Mobile Web Browsing: Usability Stud. Categories and Subject Descriptors. General Terms, страница 2

The next section is a literature review on previous research of impact of small-screen on information access. The third section of experimental design explains how the experiment was designed, the equipment and the procedure used to conduct the evaluation. It also presents the analysis of participants background information collected initially. In the fourth section, participants performance

is discussed for each of the four tasks focusing on the problems occurred. Possible reasons and result of this evaluation and collected data is analyzed and presented in fifth section. The last section concludes the evaluation findings.

2. LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 Previous research

Even though early research on non-mobile, small-screen devices suggests small screen size (especially the height of screen) has little impact on reading, comprehension and task performance [5] [6] [13] [27], user experience is not satisfactory as the presentation and accessibility of information on small display screens are not as effective as experienced in desktop environment. Many problems occur while browsing Web content developed for PCs via cellular phones [29]. If there is a substantial amount of application content, the application must have excellent navigation features along with help and search capabilities [30]. Therefore, one of the important challenges in mobile web browsing is how to present navigation elements to optimise the browsing capabilities [9].

Today, great diversity of devices and browsers are available that are better suited to web browsing on the mobile phones with small screens and limited input facility. However, the current disparity between such devices available computing resources and the resources required for smooth Web browsing makes it difficult and unpleasant to access Web pages with them [11]. There are different authoring and adaptation techniques used to make accessible pages by converting individual pages, but they are not yet widely used because the transformation quality has still got a lot to improve.

Performing tasks on handheld web browsers will place heavy cognitive demands on the user's short-term memory and with a small screen size; the user will have difficulty initially acquiring the information before activating a mental model for interpreting the information and will have difficulty placing information within the existing mental model as they progress through the information [1]. So, the Jones et al. finding of the research study on usability impact of small displays for retrieval tasks that users of the small screen were 50% less effective in completing tasks than the large screen subjects seems obvious [14]. Buchanan et al. also found out small screen users made many more incorrect choices while navigating the web pages and were less willing to browse deeply into the material [2]. Similarly, usability tests on narrow layout browsing carried out by Roto et al. found reading text on mobile phone easy and scrolling down to find the content simple, but identified several other usability problems [24]. Hence the research suggests the clear necessity of improvements and inventions to make web pages easily viewable on the small screens of mobile phones.

W3C Mobile Web Best Practices recommends not to put too many links on a page, but to make sure each page of site is easily reachable [23]. Therefore, the balance of depth and breadth of the hierarchy is particularly important for the usability of an information structure [7]. Some recent studies carried out by Mobile Web Initiative in conjunction with Segala M Test [23] on Scrolling vs. Pagination to test for user preferred method of navigation on small screens indicate that users prefer scrolling to click-throughs but some indicate the contrary and so it again highlights the need for more research in this area.