Recommended Design for UX with multiple text inputs? [closed]

Question

We (My friends and I) have created an Android Application to calculate for a snow day based on multiple text (numerical) inputs that the user interacts with. We released the app before the real storm season in order to have the max user impact, and thus we didn't really focus on UX.

Now that we have the time, we are going back to update the app before the winter and have been considering many options. Firstly, we were thinking some sort of "Holo Card" design for our app, similar to what Google uses, however, we found that the libraries that exist are not made for adding textboxes into the cards (I/O 2014 maybe??). After this, we started to look at other applications, but saw that there aren't very many professionally designed apps like this.

Do you guys have any suggestions for how to improve the UX, or how to best handle multiple user text inputs?

SIDE NOTE: We didn't reduce the number of inputs that the app takes in (through automation, weather APIs ect.) due to the specific data we are asking for, many weather APIs do not provide such data, or else we would have greatly reduced the number of inputs.

Thanks

Answer 1

If I understand how you have it designed right now, users are typing in their data where the title for that data is. I would say that is generally a bad UX decision, especially on mobile.

Either you have to leave the text there while they type, making it confusing, or you have to remove it and then if they forget what data they are supposed to be inputting they have to erase their input and let it reset.

My question to you would be: Is most of the data within a set range say 80+% of the time?

If, for example, the snow fall is always within .25 inches to 20 inches, consider a slider.

Have it look something like this:

As they scroll the slider bar along, the number in Final Data would update.

On Mobile devices / Tablets interfaces that are touch friendly work best. I would suggest you include the option to allow them to just click the [Final Data] point and manually type in an option. In the off chance there were 1000 inches of snow and they still aren't sure its going to be a snow day.

You would have the interface scroll down, for all of your inputs. If you end up going off the screen just make sure the final element is hanging off so they can see they should scroll.