Old timey data entry GUI problem

[Björnke von Gierke]

Hi everyone



Sorry for the wall of text, here's a short version:

I am developing a software for a charity tourney. I need typists to enter 4 numbers about 200 times within 30 minutes (or so). See screenshot of what I got right now: http://i.imgur.com/G7Fgg.png

I have no experience with such a situation at all. My question is: How can I enable the typists to be very quick, but also make sure that they won't accidentally submit a false or partial entry to the database?



Much more details:

There's about 200 players in the tourney, and rounds are between 30 and 45 minutes. Each of the player hands in a slip of paper as a tally after each round. Four numbers from these slips should then be entered into a database by typists. People cost money, so the less typists needed, the better. That means the form has to be geared towards fast data entry, because they need to finish in time for when the next round ends and new slips start to come in.

In my current GUI, I have four fields, with some restrictions and so on. After the fields have been filled out, the typists have to press a "Save" button with the mouse. The problem with this is of course that changing a hand from the keyboard to the mouse is just generally slow.

Some thoughts about how to approach this more efficiently:

- Use the enter key on the numpad, but only when in the last field. 
   --   I fear this could lead to some accidental entries.

- Use enter key and pop up a dialog, so that the enter key has to be pressed twice... 
   --   People would probably start to always hit twice automatically, making the entry take longer with no benefit.
   --   But then, dialogs in LC can take variable time to pop up, making 

- Force them to press shift (or other key) and return at the same time.
   --   "Smart" users could start to hold shift down all the time, because that is easier.

- On a different note, maybe have a second person reads the numbers to a typist?
   --   I feel that would make error checking after the entry too hard. 
   --   Several reader/typist pairs would confuse each other.




I know that some of you guys worked with data entry for decades, and that text only interfaces used to be all the rave. So I'm sure there are best practices, or often used approaches for something like this?

Thank you for reading
Björnke




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