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Mobile web browsing: usability study

Published: 10 September 2007 Publication History

Abstract

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.

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cover image ACM Conferences
Mobility '07: Proceedings of the 4th international conference on mobile technology, applications, and systems and the 1st international symposium on Computer human interaction in mobile technology
September 2007
702 pages
ISBN:9781595938190
DOI:10.1145/1378063
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 10 September 2007

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Author Tags

  1. evaluation
  2. internet
  3. mobile usability
  4. web browsing

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  • (2024)An AI-Resilient Text Rendering Technique for Reading and Skimming DocumentsProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642699(1-22)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2023)When Browsing Gets Cluttered: Exploring and Modeling Interactions of Browsing Clutter, Browsing Habits, and CopingProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3580690(1-29)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
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  • (2020)Modeling User-Centered Page Load Time for Smartphones22nd International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services10.1145/3379503.3403565(1-12)Online publication date: 5-Oct-2020
  • (2019)Optimizing Energy Efficiency of Browsers in Energy-Aware Scheduling-enabled Mobile DevicesThe 25th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking10.1145/3300061.3345449(1-16)Online publication date: 5-Aug-2019
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  • (2018)User Experience of Mobile Application's InterfaceProceedings of the 5th Multidisciplinary International Social Networks Conference10.1145/3227696.3227698(1-5)Online publication date: 16-Jul-2018
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