Appeal No. 1998-3394
Application 08/405,964
OPINION
The issue is whether the combination of Cox and Sidekick
would have suggested to one of ordinary skill in the art the
limitation in independent claims 1, 4, 7 and 10 of "prompting
a user in a questionnaire-style format to provide data."
The Examiner's position is as follows (FR5; see also
EA5):
Neither Cox nor Sidekick teach of using a
questionnaire-style format for user input. However, as
indicated above, Sidekick teaches that all functions can
be accessed via icons, point-and-click options,
drag-and-drop and simple pop-up and pull-down menus (See
Sidekick; page 2, lines 29-32). The examiner previously
asserted that the aforementioned items serve to prompt a
user to provide data based on a specific category or
topic area. In addition, they allow the user to
categorize data as appointment data or task data (See
Sidekick; page 2, lines 44-47). The examiner further
asserts that prompting the user with questions for input
data is well known in the art. The motivation to modify
the teachings of Cox and Sidekick to use a questionnaire-
style format is to simplify user input to discrete
questions and reduce the complexity of the programming
required for the input data module.
1.
We first look at the Examiner's conclusion that
Sidekick's disclosure of "intuitive icons, point-and-click
options, drag-and-drop and simple pop-up and pull-down menus"
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