Experimental assessment of a visual interface designed for web documents on mobile devices

The use of mobile devices as vital equipment for accessing information on-demand will continue to grow. Presenting requested information effectively on a small screen device is a challenging yet important area of active study. We have developed a prototype system that produces an outline of a web page through visual abstraction. This graphical illustration visualizes the structural layout, characteristics of components, and distributional pattern of search terms in a web document compactly and intuitively. Unlike traditional approaches that display an overview of a web document with an image-based thumbnail, the proposed system shows information using geometric shapes which decrease the data required to present the information. A usability test evaluating users' acceptance of the visualized web contents was conducted. In several areas the participants showed a higher degree of satisfaction using the proposed approach to address the difficulties in exploring web documents on a small screen device. Participants also expressed their preferences and opinions which will be valuable resources in finding future research directions.

[1]  Virpi Roto,et al.  How people use the web on mobile devices , 2008, WWW.

[2]  IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg,et al.  A document retrieval model based on term frequency ranks , 1994, SIGIR '94.

[3]  Benjamin B. Bederson,et al.  A review of overview+detail, zooming, and focus+context interfaces , 2009, CSUR.

[4]  Xing Xie,et al.  Browsing on small displays by transforming Web pages into hierarchically structured subpages , 2009, TWEB.

[5]  Vicki L. Hanson.  The user experience: designs and adaptations , 2003, W4A '04.

[6]  Gary Marsden,et al.  Using treemaps to visualize threaded discussion forums on PDAs , 2005, CHI EA '05.

[7]  Ben Shneiderman,et al.  Readings in information visualization - using vision to think , 1999 .

[8]  Piotr Indyk,et al.  Enhanced hypertext categorization using hyperlinks , 1998, SIGMOD '98.

[9]  Jun Kong,et al.  Efficient web browsing on small screens , 2008, AVI '08.

[10]  Virpi Roto,et al.  Minimap: a web page visualization method for mobile phones , 2006, CHI.

[11]  Fabio Paternò,et al.  Automatically adapting web sites for mobile access through logical descriptions and dynamic analysis of interaction resources , 2008, AVI '08.

[12]  Ben Shneiderman,et al.  Ordered and quantum treemaps: Making effective use of 2D space to display hierarchies , 2002, TOGS.

[13]  Patrick Baudisch,et al.  Keeping things in context: a comparative evaluation of focus plus context screens, overviews, and zooming , 2002, CHI.

[14]  Ben Shneiderman,et al.  The eyes have it: a task by data type taxonomy for information visualizations , 1996, Proceedings 1996 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages.

[15]  Patrick Baudisch,et al.  Halo: a technique for visualizing off-screen objects , 2003, CHI '03.

[16]  Carl Gutwin,et al.  Interacting with Big Interfaces on Small Screens: a Comparison of Fisheye, Zoom, and Panning Techniques , 2004, Graphics Interface.

[17]  Oscar de Bruijn,et al.  Rapid serial visual presentation: a space-time trade-off in information presentation , 2000, AVI '00.

[18]  Thomas Ertl,et al.  Computer Graphics - Principles and Practice, 3rd Edition , 2014 .

[19]  Huberman,et al.  Strong regularities in world wide web surfing , 1998, Science.

[20]  Luca Chittaro,et al.  Visualizing locations of off-screen objects on mobile devices: a comparative evaluation of three approaches , 2006, Mobile HCI.

[21]  Gerard Salton,et al.  Automatic Text Processing: The Transformation, Analysis, and Retrieval of Information by Computer , 1989 .