GUI pattern for presenting long forms

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

I need to design GUI for an application which is essentially an app which will allow the users to enter and modify parameters of legal contracts. Users must also be able to review all those parameters on screen. The problem is that there is really really a lot of parameters (each contract contains hundreds of fields).

Each contract consists of sections and subsections. The problem is that those subsections are often nested and can contain many records. E.g. A "Party" of the contract can have several addresses (1 to e.g.3) and a number of contact persons (1 to e.g. 7). And users do not want the screen to be divided into tabs (each tab corresponding to each section).

So I decided to split the screen where the document is displayed into a number of collapsible sections / subsections, as below:

MAIN MENU | MAIN MENU | MAIN MENU | MAIN MENU

• Main Contract parameters: ---------------------------

  • Field 1:___________ Field 2:_________
  • Field 3:___________ Field 4:_________

• Party 1: -----------------------------------------------------

  • Party 1 Address: --------------------------------
    • Address Field 1_____________
    • Address Field 2_____________
    • Address Field 3_____________

• Party 2: -----------------------------------------------------

  • Party 2 Address: ------------------------------------
    • Address Field 1_____________
    • Address Field 2_____________
    • Address Field 3_____________

• Products

• Fees
• Etc.
• Etc.

Clicking on each section / subsection expands or collapses it. Problem is that I ended up with a very long screen which users can scroll up / down. What can I do to have the screen less cluttered?

I am considering moving at least level one sections to a left side panel (pretty much like outlook does). That way the screen itself would have less fields at any given time, but users would need to jump between the sections, so am I not sure if it would be beneficial...

Do you know maybe of any good GUI patterns / examples which facilitate presentation of very long / nested forms?

Many Thanks