Browsing on Mobile Phones Customer Focused Mobile Services

Browsing on Mobile Phones Customer Focused Mobile Services Workshop in WWW 2005 conference May 10 th, 2005 Virpi Roto Senior Usability Specialist, Browsing Nokia Research Center, Finland 1 © NOKIA 2005 Virpi Roto

Why this topic? • Browsing on mobile phones will increase • • • Faster connection Less expensive Better display Better interaction mechanisms Links in emails • Full Web access drives mobile-friendly content • Use cases different from a desktop 2 © NOKIA 2005 Virpi Roto

3 layers, holistic usability 3 © NOKIA 2005 Virpi Roto

Web pages on small devices Keyhole view problems: • Hard to know what is on this page • Hard to find the target content • Wide texts unreadable on small screens 4 © NOKIA 2005 Virpi Roto

Zoom out? Miniature page: + Better understanding on what’s there - Text too small to read when rows fit the screen width - Zooming either requires a dedicated key or a mode - In optimal case, you should be able to zoom & scroll at the same time, which is hard on a limited device 5 © NOKIA 2005 Virpi Roto

Maybe just new packaging? ; o) 6 © NOKIA 2005 Virpi Roto

Narrow layout? Narrow layout: • De facto Web viewing method 2005 on small screens + Wide texts readable - Wide images squeezed to tiny ones, impossible to interpret - Data tables ruined - Hard to know where the needed content is - Huge scrolling effort - Top content looks the same -> Déjà vu 7 © NOKIA 2005 Virpi Roto

Similar top content problem in Narrow layout Nothing seems to have changed I do it again and again! I should have scrolled down to see the change 8 © NOKIA 2005 Virpi Roto

Better information visualization methods needed for Web pages on Mobile Phones A modified original layout 9 © NOKIA 2005 Virpi Roto

Guidelines for Web authors To keep a Web site content mobile phone friendly 1. Avoid large objects that need to be visible at one glance 2. Avoid using small text in images 3. Keep the pages light 10 © NOKIA 2005 Virpi Roto