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

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.

Effects of screen resolution and column ratio on search performance and subjective preferences

This study proposes a submenu window as a navigation aid for mobile Internet access on a cellular phone. The submenu window presents child-level menu items along with their upper-level menu. The effectiveness of the submenu window was investigated in an experiment. The factors manipulated in the experiment include the types of submenu window, age of participants, and timing of presenting the submenu. Task completion time, number of button clicks, and subjective preference were measured while the participants were performing target search tasks. The results showed that they preferred the separate submenu window. The best performance was obtained when the submenu immediately followed the selection of its parent menu. In addition, the participants in their 20s found a target menu item with fewer button clicks than did the teenagers. The separate submenu window with no delay was recommended in terms of both performance and subjective preference. The design guidelines for submenu windows on a small-screen device are also provided. The results of this study are expected to be applicable to menu-driven interfaces of many small-screen devices such as digital cameras and personal digital assistants.

Internet access using mobile handheld devices has surpassed that of fixed Internet, but most web pages are designed for desktop browsers. Mobile devices have resource limitations. Consequently, web pages designed for desktop browsing cannot be well displayed on mobile devices. Thus, dynamically transforming web contents designed for desktops into contents which can be displayed in a mobile device is an important task. Various approaches of content adaptation have been proposed to achieve this goal, but no single content adaptation strategy has been found to be effective. On the other hand, e-learning contents have grown manifold over years. In this paper, we provide a framework for an e-learning content adaptation system that can be used with desktops and mobile devices seamlessly. We combine multiple content adaptation strategies to make e-learning contents appropriate for mobile devices. Among the various content adaptation strategies, the segmentation algorithm plays the most important role. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed scheme can be successfully utilized for content adaptation in mobile and handheld devices.

The content elements and the connections between elements form an information space that is conceptually similar to a physical space. Navigation is a common problem in information space and in physical space. Using an appropriate metaphor is a key factor in transforming abstract information space into a tangible space that users can accept. This research proposes an interface design approach to navigate an information space, such as the contents of a website or a museum, with a tangible user interface (TUI). The goal of the TUI is to connect the digital and physical space with a visible and tangible form. Tangible objects are used as metaphors to manipulate the information space. Information finding tasks are given to the participants to test user performance and errors, and subjective satisfaction is evaluated with questionnaires. The effects of metaphors and the TUI/graphics user interface (GUI) are to be investigated. The results show that metaphors help users find information with better performance and lower error rates. Users also perceive more usability from interfaces with metaphors and think they can work better. The proposed TUI system can get similar errors and subjective usability as a GUI system, which users are more familiar with.

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.

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.

In order to improve the user ' s ability to access websites and web pages, according to the interest preference of the user, the personalized recommendation design is carried out, and the personalized recommendation model for web page visit is established to meet the personalized interest demand of the user to browse the web page. A webpage personalized recommendation algorithm based on association rule mining is proposed. Based on the semantic features of web pages, user browsing behavior is calculated by similarity computation, and web crawler algorithm is constructed to extract the semantic features of web pages. The autocorrelation matching method is used to match the features of web page and user browsing behavior, and the association rules feature quantity of user browsing website behavior is mined. According to the semantic relevance and semantic information of web users to search words, fuzzy registration is taken, Web personalized recommendation is obtained to meet the needs of the users browse the web. The simulation results show that the method is accurate and user satisfaction is higher.

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.

Web page recommender system provides users with recommendations to assist their navigation and increases the website usability and user satisfaction. In this chapter, Web page recommendation method is presented by constructing User Session Graph using user sessions from the navigation log. The node represents Web pages and weight on the edge is calculated by the number of times the Web pages present in the sessions. new page problem is solved by computing co-occurrence value between two terms present in titles. Web pages are recommended based on connected nodes in the graph and co-occurred terms. Experiments are conducted on user navigation data collected from Microsoft Website www.microsoft.com. The proposed method is compared with TermNetWP method and outperforms TermNetWP with higher precision and satisfaction values.

With the growing capability of mobile devices, platforms, and wireless communication technologies, Web browsing on mobile devices is made possible and receives more and more attentions. However, environment of mobile device varies; traditionally, Web pages cannot be browsed if mobile user enters an environment where there is no connection to Internet, such as in a basement or countryside. Although Google Gears had been proposed to support offline Web browsing, there are still a lot of Web servers providing their services without support Google Gears. In this paper, we propose a middleware for mobile devices with properties including (1) enabling users to access the predefined Web information without network connection, (2) offline data stored on mobile device should be long-term storage, and (3) even a Web server doesn't support Google Gears, its Web pages still can be browsed offline.

A great deal of research has been done focusing on font, text size, and background colors for use with PowerPoint and on Web pages; but no research has been done to aid in the development of PowerPoint presentations for use on small screen devices such as the iPod.In this study, the researcher developed a PowerPoint that tested font size and clarity, text color against background, as well as clarity of images and graphs and found that much of what works in a quality PowerPoint presentation for computer screens does not work for small screens. This paper presents the result of this study and suggests some guidelines that can be used to create video podcasts that can be viewed in a variety of settings; thereby making the video podcast a useful extension of the classroom PowerPoint.

Mobile internet browsing usually involves a lot of horizontal and vertical scrolling, which makes web browsing time-consuming and in addition user may be interested in a section of a web page, which may not fit to the mobile screen. This requires more scrolling in both directions. In this paper, we propose to address this problem by displaying the block title and hide the block body contents from a large web page while maintaining their semantics, which displays only the condensed information. The Flexi-adaptor, reduces unnecessary information by allowing its users to see the most relevant blocks of the page and provides the block title. The Flexi-adaptor categorized each object of the web page as menu, block title and main content. Assign a weight to each object of the block by analyzing the object elements. It uses depth first traversal algorithm to select blocks, and delivers them to handheld devices. The proposed solution improves web content accessibility and delivers the target contents to the users.KeywordsContent adaptationmobile browsingsmall displayadaptive interface for small screens

This study examined the effects of display curvature, presbyopia, and task duration on visual fatigue, task performance, and user satisfaction. Although curved displays have been applied to diverse display products, and some studies reported their benefits, it is still unknown whether the effects of display curvature are presbyopia-specific. Each of 64 individuals (eight nonpresbyopes and eight presbyopes per display curvature) performed four 15-min proofreading tasks at one display curvature radius setting (600R, 1140R, 4000R, and flat; mm). Diverse measurements were obtained to assess visual fatigue, task performance, and user satisfaction. The mean pupil diameter was the largest with 1140R, indicating this curvature radius was associated with the least development of visual fatigue; 600R was comparable with 1140R in terms of pupil diameter. The presbyopic group showed a 28.5% slower proofreading speed compared with the nonpresbyopic group, whereas their proofreading accuracy was comparable. For both groups, the mean visual fatigue increased significantly during the first 15 min of proofreading, as indicated by a decrease of 0.11 mm in the mean pupil diameter, an increase of 3.8 in the mean bulbar conjunctival redness, and an increase of 9.13 in the mean eye complaint questionnaire score. The effect of display curvature was not presbyopia-specific. Low visual fatigue was observed with 1140R and 600R. Display curvature radii near or in the range of 600R and 1140R and frequent breaks are recommended for both presbyopic and nonpresbyopic groups to reduce their visual fatigue due to visual display terminal tasks.

The mobile phones are increasingly used to access different kind of information other than just to make voice calls. However, browsing large web pages which is not adapted for small-screen viewing is still very inconvenient. Web browsers are emerging which try to solve the interaction problems that occur when small-screen devices are used to access web pages designed for large screen viewing. This paper presents the results of the usability study in which users' mobile web browsing experience was evaluated in comparison to desktop Web browsing. The results indicate the users' performance was poor on mobile browser as users expected similar experience as on desktop; however for some users familiarity of web on desktop helped instead to navigate easily on mobile browser. The main problem participants had was difficulty of locating the content in long narrow page, which in turn caused extensive scrolling. This research suggests some improvement for mobile web browser and important consideration in designing mobile friendly websites that could help limit a lot of scrolling and increase the readability.