Improving Web Interaction on Small Displays

[Jones, M. Marsden, G., Mohd-Nasir, N & Boone, K (1999). Improving web interaction in small screen displays. Computer Networks 31 (1999) 1129-1137.Elsevier.]

Soon many people will retrieve information from the Web using handheld, palmsized or even smaller computers. Although these computers have dramatically increased in sophistication, their display size is – and will remain – much smaller than their conventional, desktop counterparts. Currently, browsers for these devices present web pages without taking account of the very different display capabilities. As part of a collaborative project with Reuters, we carried out a study into the usability impact of small displays for retrieval tasks. Users of the small screen were 50% less effective in completing tasks than the large screen subjects. Small screen users used a very substantial number of scroll activities in attempting to complete the tasks. Our study also provided us with interesting insights into the shifts in approach users seem to make when using a small screen device for retrieval. These results suggest that the metaphors useful in a full screen desktop environment are not the most appropriate for the new devices. Design guidelines are discussed, here, proposing directed access methods for effective small screen interaction. In our ongoing work, we are developing such “meta-interfaces” which will sit between the small screen user and the “conventional” web page.

Read the full paper, or for those in a hurry, here are some design pointers...

Our investigations highlight some ways in which web content can be adapted to make it more accessible to mobile handheld computing users. The overall aim of our ongoing project is to provide automatic adaptations of content so users can gain access to as wide a range of the material as possible. However, the guidelines we raise below are applicable to content which is to be specifically designed for small display platforms.

Provide direct access

Reading on the web seems to be much more active than reading from the page – users are seeking out information, scanning for things that interest them [7]. When they are using handheld, small screen displays this appears to be especially true [5]. Small screen users seem to choose and prefer direct access strategiesover less directed, browsing approaches.

Handheld content should be adapted then in the following sorts of way:

Provision of search mechanism: sites which are to be viewed by handheld users must provide one ormore direct search features.
Structure information to provide focussed navigation: this could be done by, for example, presenting the user with a list of goals they might want to achieve from the site or page. Adaptation agents (human or automated) need to consider why a user might be accessing the site or a particular page and present a framework which will facilitate such access. The Wireless Application Protocol committee 2 have proposed a markup language (compatible with XML) which embodies such a task-orientated approach for devices with very small screens (e.g. mobile `phones). Theng [14] has also done some exploratory work with conventional hypertext systems in this area.

Reduce scrolling

It is clear that users will potentially have to carry far many scroll actions using small screen displays. Such
activity will interrupt their primary tasks.

Scrolling can be reduced by:

Placing navigational features (menu bars etc) near the top of pages in a fixed place. For example, our test site had the menus fixed on the left hand side of all pages.
Placing key information at the top of pages.
Reducing the amount of information on the page, making the content task focussed rather than verbose. Nielson suggests that this rule is applicable to all web sites, arguing that users scan web pages rather than read them word by word (in tests he found that 79% of users scan text and only 16% read word for word [7]).

There are some commercial products that can carry out some of these adaptations automatically. These filtering tools, such as Spyglass’ s Prism 3 , transform pages by removing white space, shrinking or removing images and so on. Our initial investigations suggest that such syntactic changes will be useful but that rearrangements based on the semantics of the page (e.g., knowing that a list is a navigation element) would provide further benefits. As others have suggested, style sheets for small screen platforms could also be used to reduce the amount of scrolling needed. For example, display space used by various elements, like main headings, could be shrunk to fit the available space.

Other Resources

The Stanford Digital Library team have done some great work in this area with their PowerBrowser.