Mobile Web Browsing: Usability Stud. Categories and Subject Descriptors. General Terms, страница 10

On desktop, because of the familiarity of web pages, participants took no time to find the information. But on mobile browser, most of them struggled to follow the similar navigation path when they looked for the content and the page was different from the desktop. But in this evaluation study, some still managed to identify the links by remembering the position with respect to other links. For example, on Yahoo page, one participant spotted the weather link by its relative location even though the page was very long and appeared different from the desktop. Similarly, one

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For few participants the familiarity of the web pages on a desktop browser helped recognize the relevant links on mobile display, but for others it caused more frustration as they were expecting and not able to find the information as experienced on the desktop.

Participants thought the web pages were heavily loaded with information for the viewing on the small-screen and were just too long requiring extensive scrolling. Similar previous research studies have shown that the user do not seem to suffer much from the re-layout, as long as they are able to follow the familiar navigation path [15] [24]. But the participants were overwhelmed to see the page such as Yahoo squeezed to fit in the small display width and found difficult to get the picture of the whole site, and thus difficulty to follow the familiar navigation path. However, as they experienced, they mentioned that the information is there somewhere and it was just a matter of finding it. Therefore, possibly this is the reason why they did not really disagree with the statement that it is easy to find the information using web browser on mobile phone and so the average rating was 3.3.

5.8 Overall web browsing experience on mobile phone

According to Zhang et al. user satisfaction is the result of the interplay between the features in the web environment,

information seeking tasks, and information seeker characteristics, and it is useful to determine what makes a user satisfied with a website as well as what are potential dissatisfiers [31].

Typically users access and retrieve information in a web environment using the web interface, which should support easy and flexible control and quality of display should be reasonably good. User satisfaction is one of the important measures of usability to study perceived success of any kind of interface. Tasks were purposely chosen simple so that they would be very common for all and the main focus of the study was to evaluate

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information environment - the mobile web interface.

The display size has always been criticized and considered as one of the major problem for presenting information effectively. Considering the limited display, the organization of information that the web browser reformats and displays plays a vital role on how effectively users can browse and thus heavily influences the user experience.

In this evaluation, participants were interested in mobile web browsing and did not have problem understanding the way web pages could be viewed on mobile browser, as in Roto et al.

evaluation [24]. But, using mobile web browser, even though the change of the usual page structure is easy to understand and participants could easily learn to work with it, they found it not very simple to interact with, which in turn affected their user

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which simply reflects his mobile web browsing experience. The average rating for overall web browsing experience on mobile phone was 3.5.

6. CONCLUSION