Mobile Web Browsing: Usability Stud. Categories and Subject Descriptors. General Terms, страница 12

Even though, the idea of using this kind of mobile web browser is simply to be able to view the web pages designed for desktop viewing, if such web pages are designed with some consideration for small screen viewing purpose, it can reduce the considerable amount of existing usability problems that users encounter while viewing on mobile web browser. Mobile guidelines such as [20] [21] [23] can be referred for general guidelines to help create sites for the mobile web.

Below are some of the important considerations for designing mobile friend pages that can limit scrolling and increase the readability while viewed on narrow-layout mobile web browser:

Select the font and background color that would not hamper the visibility of text or links

Label all the input fields and form controls, so that users can easily identify

Limit the number of links in the list, group them and label with appropriate title, so that users will know where the link is in the collapsed or a grouped links

Rather than images, prefer using text for links and buttons where possible, because it may increase the size of the page and thus longer time to download, and in small-screen images are sometimes difficult to interpret, especially if users are not familiar with those pages, and

Always consider adding search function on the page;

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search and find easily.

7.  REFERENCES

[1]  Albers, M.J. & Kim, L. 2000, "User web browsing characteristics using palm handhelds for information retrieval", Proceedings of IEEE professional communication society international professional communication conference and Proceedings of the 18th annual ACM international conference on Computer documentation: technology & teamwork, , pp. 125-135.

[2]  Ballard, B. 2004, "Mobile Web Development Version 1.1 " in UI Design Guidelines for Mobile Web Development

Little Springs Design, Inc, United States, pp. 59-80.

[3]  Buchanan, G., Farrant, S., Jones, M., Thimbleby, H., Marsden, G. & Pazzani, M. 2001, "Improving mobile internet usability", WWW '01: Proceedings of the 10th international conference on World Wide WebACM Press, pp. 673.

[4]  Chan, S., Fang, X., Brzezinski, J., Zhou, Y., Xu, S. & Lam, J. 2002, "Usability for mobile commerce across multiple form factors", Journal of Electronic Commerce Research, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 187-199.

[5]  Dillion, A., Richardson, J. and McKnight, C. 1990, The effect of display size and text splitting on reading lengthy text from the screen. Behaviour and Information Technology 9(3):

215-227

[6]  Duchnicky, R.L. and Kolers, P.A. 1983, Readability of text scrolled on visual display terminals as a function of window size. Human Factors 25(6): 683-692

[7]  Geven, A., Sefelin, R. & Tscheligi, M. 2006, "Depth and breadth away from the desktop: the optimal information hierarchy for mobile use", Proceedings of the 8th conference on Human-computer interaction with mobile devices and services, , pp. 157-164.

[8]  Giller, V., Melcher, R., Schrammel, J., Sefelin, R. & Tscheligi, M. 2003, "Usability evaluations for multi-device application development three example studies", Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, vol. 2795, pp. 302-316.

[9]  Hyvärinen, T., Kaikkonen, A. & Hiltunen, M. 2005, "Placing links in mobile banking application", MobileHCI '05: Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Human computer interaction with mobile devices \& servicesACM Press, New York, NY, USA, pp. 63.

[10]  Hong, J.I., Landay, J. & Van Duyne, D. 2002, "Running Usability Evaluations" in The Design of Sites: Patterns, Principles, and Processes for Crafting a Customer-Centered Web Experience Addison-Wesley, Reading, UK.