The main obstacles in Web browsing using mobile phones are the limited screen sizes and input capabilities, and thus we need to solve them while presenting an overview as well. Therefore, in this paper, we aim to find a more effective way to show the overview of a Web page. Some participants in our previous user experiments commented that they could not see the details of the contents in Web pages, which disturbed them as they looked for the information they needed. However, since it scales down the page to fit the mobile phone's screen, it is too small to show the details of the content.
This method is effective to some extent, by allowing users to view the overall structure of the page at a glance. The conventional method for overview presentation is to show a scaled-down page that fits a mobile phone's screen (Chen, Ma, & Zhang, 2003). In the user experiments conducted in our previous studies (Arase, Hara, Uemukai, & Nishio, 2007 Arase, Maekawa, Hara, Uemukai, & Nishio, 2007), we confirmed that presenting an overview of a Web page is crucial for Web browsing using mobile phones. Since mobile phones can present only a small portion of a Web page, users cannot grasp the entire structure of the page, and thus users cannot predict where to find the contents of their interest or decide which direction to scroll. One of the serious problems in mobile Web browsing is that users often get lost in a Web page. However, the small screens and poor input capabilities of mobile phones, such as a direction pad and telephone keypad (laid out in a 3 4 grid and allocating numbers and letters for text messaging), cause difficulties for Web browsing because the sizes of Web pages are much larger than those of mobile phone screens. Results of a user experiment show that annotations are informative for users who want to find contents from a large Web page.ĭue to the advances in data-processing and communication technologies, mobile phones are now widely used to access the Web. Therefore, in this paper, the authors present annotations on a Web page that provides a functionality which automatically scrolls the page. Although prior studies adopted the conventional style of overview, that is, a scaled-down image of the page, this is not sufficient because users cannot see details of the contents.
To solve this problem, an effective technique is to present an overview of the page. One of the serious problems of mobile Web browsing is that users often get lost in a Web page and can only view a small portion of a Web page at a time, not able to grasp the entire page’s structure to decide which direction their information of interest is located.
In this regard, small screens and poor input capabilities of mobile phones prevent users from comfortably browsing Web pages that are designed for desktop PCs. AbstractDue to advances in mobile phones, mobile Web browsing has become increasingly popular.
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