Improving web search on small screen devices

Abstract

Small handheld devices-mobile phones, Pocket PCs etc.-are increasingly being used to access the web. Search engines are the most used web services and are an important factor of user support. Search engine providers have begun to offer their services on the small screen. This paper presents a detailed evaluation of the how easy to use such services are in these new contexts. An experiment was carried out to compare users' abilities to complete search tasks using a mobile phone-sized, handheld computer-sized and conventional, desktop interface to the full Googlee index. With all three interfaces, when users succeed in completing a task, they do so quickly (within 2 -3 min) and using few interactions with the search engine. When they fail, though, they fail badly. The paper examines the causes of failures in small screen searching and proposes guidelines for improving these interfaces. In addition, we present and discuss novel interaction schemes that put these guidelines into practice. q

Evaluating the Social Acceptability of Voice Based Smartwatch Search

“…Jones et al [3] evaluated users' abilities on mobile phones, PDAs, and desktop interfaces for some of the earliest mobile search systems. They found that both the search speed and accuracy were worse on smaller screens.…”

Impact of screen size on performance, awareness, and user satisfaction with adaptive graphical user interfaces

“…With the proliferation of mobile phones and PDAs, small screen devices are now pervasive, but smaller screens can make even basic tasks such as reading and web browsing more difficult [9,19]. The reduced screen size means that, even with high resolution screens, designers must choose only the most important features to display.…”

“…Additionally, users tend to use mobile devices in contexts where their attention is limited in comparison to traditional environments [24], which may make it more difficult to navigate a complex interface. To address the limitations of small screen devices, several researchers have proposed that adaptive interfaces, where the system tailors the interface to an individual user's needs, may be beneficial [2,19].…”

“…Despite the potential theoretical benefits, research on adaptation for small screens has focused largely on adaptive web content (e.g., [19,28]) rather than on adaptive graphical user interface (GUI) control structures. GUI control structures, such as menus, present unique challenges in comparison to adaptation of content, for example, a higher user expectation for consistency [5].…”

Interaction Design for Personal Photo Management on a Mobile Device

“…Unfortunately, we have to live with them because these natural limitations arise from the fact that most mobile devices need to be, by definition, small and mobile. Studies on Web page searching on mobile devices (Jones et al, 1999;Jones et al, 2003), though not specifically on photo searching, form a useful starting point for searching within a mobile photo management context; ideas for visualization on mobile devices have been proposed, especially for displaying interactive maps for location-based navigation (Chittaro, 2006). The minimal attention user interface (MAUI) (Pascoe et al, 2000) tries to design a mobile interface that requires minimal user attention.…”