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In recent years, small screen devices, such as cellular phones or Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), enjoy phenomenal popularity. PDAs can be used to complement traditional computing systems to access personal multimedia information beyond the usage as digital organizers. However, due to the physical limitations accessing rich multimedia contents and diverse services using a single PDA is more difficult. Hence, the Situated Computing Framework (SCF) research project at Siemens Corporate Research (SCR) aims to develop a ubiquitous computing infrastructure that facilitates nomadic users to access rich multimedia contents using small screen devices. This paper describes a new distributed computing concept, the Small Screen/Composite Device (SS/CD) framework, which offers mobile users new classes of ubiquitous and mobile multimedia services without to limit the diversity and the richness of the provided services.

Today, the average consumer is comfortable browsing a web site using a desktop, laptop or kiosk computer. However, this is changing a rapid rate as more and more consumers access the same web content using a small screen device such as a mobile phone or personal digital assistant (PDA). Regardless of the consumers’ expertise with the mobile device, the experience is becoming frustrating as they try to navigate their way through web content that has been designed for a large screen; a design that results in cumbersome layout, slow-loading images and ‘off-screen’ navigation points when viewed on a small screen device. The result is dissatisfaction on part of the consumer, and possible loss of revenue for an e-business enterprise. The main objective of this paper is to highlight several techniques and technologies that are currently available that can assist in displaying ‘user-friendly’ web pages regardless of the screen size of the device.

Small screen appliances, such as cellular phones or Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), enjoy enormous popularity as is evidenced by the tremendous commercial success. One focus of the ubiquitous research community is the potential utility of this class of devices beyond that of a basic organizer or communication device. The pocket-sized requirement imposes constraints upon the computational power and user interface of these small screen devices. This paper describes the Composite Device Computing Environment (CDCE) that offers a framework for supporting nomadic users with small screen devices for the retrieval of rich contents and the access of diverse services. CDCE provides a communication network infrastructure for seeking, unifying and exploiting any surrounding devices as a means to overcome the small screen client constraints. This paper describes the architecture and reports the current status of the ongoing realization of CDCE.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to carry out a survey in order to better understand the nature of handheld mobile computing use by academic library users and to determine whether there is a significant demand for using the library services with these small screen devices.Design/methodology/approachA survey is created to measure whether people want to access an OPAC with a small screen. Additionally, through open‐ended questions, the survey attempts to gain a broader understanding of handheld mobile computing's impact on, and implications for, the services provided by academic libraries.FindingsA total of 58.4 percent of respondents who own a web‐enabled handheld device indicate that they would use small screen devices, such as PDAs or web‐enabled cell phones to search a library OPAC.Originality/valueThe increasing prevalence of handheld mobile computing devices such as PDAs and web‐enabled cell phones warrants investigation as to its impact on libraries. This study examines an academic library user population and the potential demand for using the library's catalog with handheld mobile computing devices

In this paper, we illustrate the use of space-time trade-offs for information presentation on small screens. We propose the use of Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) to provide a rich set of navigational information for Web browsing. The principle of RSVP browsing is applied to the development of a Web browser for small screen devices, the RSVP browser. The results of an experiment in which Web browsing with the RSVP browser is compared with that of a typical WAP browser suggests that RSVP browsing may indeed offer alternative to other forms of Web browsing on small screen devices.

In this study we focused on the social representations of digital teaching among Higher Education agents, considering their reported experience (more or less diversified) and type of access (mobile devices or not, large-screen devices or small screen-devices). The context of the study was a public Higher Education institution in the North of Portugal in which the Moodle was adopted years-ago to support learning activities. The participants were 36 teachers (39% males, 61% females), aged between 25 and 55 years-old, and 144 freshmen students (20% males, 80% females), aged between 18 and 57 years-old, enrolled in different programs in the area of Health care. They answered to a questionnaire that consisted of: free association tasks around stimuli such as digital teaching and Moodle; a semantic differentiation scale on the attitudes towards Moodle; multiple choice questions about the levels of use and type of access to the platform; and demographic questions, including age and sex. A content-analysis of the qualitative data was conducted, using a macro developed in Excel. Words evoked by the participants were reduced to their most common form and phases rewritten to their common theme. Words and themes were then grouped under overarching categories. A descriptive analysis of the quantitative data was also performed. Results revealed that whereas for the teachers the semantic field of digital teaching consisted of the categories accessibility (47%), evolution (42%), and distance (39%); for the students it consisted of technology (97%), evolution (59%), and easiness (37%). The Moodle was seen as a kind of repository by the majority of the students (89%). Such image is shared by less than one half of teachers (36%) and it was more common among those who declared to use more functionalities of the learning management system (LMS). It is worth mentioning that almost one half of students associated the Moodle with knowledge (49%). Errors and the dependency on the Internet were pointed out as the main constrains of the LMS, while accessibility and easiness of use were the main advantages. With respect to access, the portable computer was the device most used by both teachers and students (90%). Desktops were used by more than 80% of teachers and by less than 20% of students, while the reverse picture was found in the access by mobile phone (around 20% of teachers and around 70% of students). This study provides interesting clues about the relation between the social position of the agents and their representations. The social representations seem to be more homogeneous among students than among teachers, suggesting that there is a relation with practices. The fact that the image of the Moodle as a repository is more present among the teachers who reported having used more functionalities of the Moodle is somewhat counter-intuitive and urges for more studies. It is also very suggestive that the agents use different anchors to represent digital teaching: distance in the case of the teachers and technology in the case of the students, though they converge in seeing it as a sign of evolution. Although mobile access seems to be more frequent among students, big screen devices are more used than small screen devices. These results do not support the idea of a screen-device gap among the participants, but should nevertheless open a discussion about what kind of affordances are being explored in digital teaching.

In recent years, small screen devices have seen widespread increase in their acceptance and use. Combining mobility with their increased technological advances many such devices can now be considered mobile information terminals. However, user interactions with small screen devices remain a challenge due to the inherent limited display capabilities. These challenges are particularly evident for tasks, such as information seeking. In this paper we assess the effectiveness of using hierarchical-query biased summaries as a means of supporting the results of an information search conducted on a small screen device, a PDA. We present the results of an experiment focused on measuring users’ perception of relevance of displayed documents, in the form of automatically generated summaries of increasing length, in response to a simulated submitted query. The aim is to study experimentally how users’ perception of relevance varies depending on the length of summary, in relation to the characteristics of the PDA interface on which the content is presented. Experimental results suggest that hierarchical query-biased summaries are useful and assist users in making relevance judgments.

ABSTRACTBandwidth is still a limiting factor for the Quality of Service (QoS) of mobile communication applications. In particular, for Voice over IP the QoS is not yet as good as for common, well-engineered, public-switched telephone networks. Multisensory communication has been identified as a possibility to moderate this limitation. One of the strengths of mobile video technology lies in its combination of visual and auditory modalities. However, one of the most salient features of mobile video applications is its small screen size. To test the potential of multimodal synergy for mobile devices, we assessed to what extent small screens affect multimodal synergy. This potential was assessed in an experiment with 54 participants, who conducted a standardised video-listening test for three talking-heads videos with a signal-to-noise ratio of –9 dB. The videos were presented on three different screen sizes, whilst keeping the video and auditory signals equal. Compared to a ground truth based on 359 participants, intelligibility was found to be significantly higher when using a large screen than when using a small screen. This indicates that mobile video technology has the potential for a significant multimodal synergy to which screen size is a substantial constraint. To optimally benefit from their multimodal potential, we offer suggestions on how to increase the effective screen size for small screen (e.g. mobile) devices and applications through elaborating the most relevant (visual) features. We conclude that knowledge about human sensory processing can alleviate the identified constraint and maximise the potential QoS of mobile video technology.

Mobile devices have made the world a small place. They are also being used widely, to access the Web. However, because most available web pages are designed for desktop PC in mind, it is inconvenient to browse these large web pages on a mobile device with a small screen. With the enormous increase in mobile users since last decade, to such an extent that it even exceeds the number of desktop users in many developing countries, it becomes crucial to design systems for Web Manipulation, there by providing easier and greater accessibility and device independence. In this paper, we propose a new browsing technique to facilitate efficient web access and provide a better user experience on a device with rather small screen as compared to the usual desktop. It also proposes a novel technique to handle multimedia content, especially the images and video on a web page. In order to solve the problem of incomplete tags in HTML, an equivalent XML is generated for the desired webpage. For efficient browsing, the web page is represented as a multi level hierarchy, with the index of major sections on the first level and the sections indexed again in to sub-sections on the second level and so on, until we reach sub-sections that can be represented as sub-pages that fit in the small screen. We also propose an efficient algorithm for navigating through the sub-pages, thereby providing better user experience. The proposed technique provides better and efficient web browsing on mobile small displays up to user satisfaction.

Semantic information is necessary for Semantic Web processing and is useful to Web adaptation services such as personalization of users' browsing activities on small screen devices. However, semantic information is always implicitly encoded in most existing HTML documents. This paper describes a page segmentation method to parse Web pages into rectangular segments containing some semantic information, namely blocks. Existing page segmentation techniques are mainly built on HTML DOM structure or purely vision based, not accurate enough either in visual presentation or in semantic sense. Our approach is automatic, and based on a refined typing system which tightly couples type analysis with indispensable visual cues to generate blocks into the tree structure, aiming to achieve high degree of coherence in both semantic and visual views. Experimental results show better accuracy and completeness of our method over existing ones.

Web pages consist of different visual segments, serving different purposes. Typical structural segments are header, right or left columns and main content. Segments can also have nested structure which means some segments may include other segments. Understanding these segments is important in properly displaying web pages for small screen devices and in alternative forms such as audio for screen reader users. There exist different techniques in identifying visual segments in a web page. One successful approach is Vision Based Segmentation Algorithm (VIPS Algorithm) which uses both the underlying source code and also the visual rendering of a web page. However, there are some limitations of this approach and this paper explains how we have extended and improved VIPS and built it in Java. We have also conducted some online user evaluations to investigate how people perceive the success of the segmentation approach and in which granularity they prefer to see a web page segmented. This paper presents the preliminary results which show that, people perceive segmentation with higher granularity as better segmentation regardless of the web page complexity.

Navigation techniques for small-screen devices: An evaluation on maps and web pages

There are many sets of guidelines concerning the accessibility of the web for older adults, but little empirical evidence from studies with older people to support their recommendations. In addition, all the recommendations apply to text in languages using the Latin alphabet. This study investigated the effects of text color and background color on the performance and preferences of younger and older adults on webpages in the Thai language. There were 18 Thai younger participants (19 - 29 years) and 18 Thai older participants (59 - 70 years). There were three combinations of text color and color (black text on white background, white text on black background, and sepia text on off-white background). The text and background color combinations failed to have any significant effects on the performance measures of task completion rate or time spent skim reading webpages. However, for the preference measure, there was a significant difference between combinations of text and background color but no differences between the age groups. There was also a significant interaction between combinations of text and background color and age group. These results form an useful basis for web design guidelines for Thai websites for text and background color for both younger and older users.

User experience with web browsing on small screens: Experimental investigations of mobile-page interface design and homepage design for news websites

Mobile devices have already been widely used to access the Web. However, because most available web pages are designed for desktop PC, it is inconvenient to browse these large web pages on a mobile device with a small screen. In this paper, we propose a new web page transforming scheme to facilitate navigation on a small-form-factor device based on cloud computing. Different with other existing schemes, our approach is based on page segmentation and template-rendering. The semantic structure of a web page is extracted by DOM (Document Object Model) analyzing. Such semantic structure is hierarchical. Each node is corresponded to a block area of one web page and is in charge of reconstructing the whole web page. According to different content styles, the template-rendering scheme generates different display modes. Experimental results show good experience.