Journal of Information and Operations Management ISSN: 0976–7754 & E-ISSN: 0976–7762 , Volume 3, Issue 1, 2012, pp-146-148 Available online at http://www.bioinfo.in/contents.php?id=55

EFFECTIVE WEB BROWSING ON MOBILE PHONES

MINIT ARORA

SGRR Institute of Technology & Science, Dehradun, India *Corresponding Author: Email- [email protected]

Received: December 12, 2011; Accepted: January 15, 2012

Abstract- Recently there has been a proliferation of communication and computing with smaller display devices, such as mobile phones. Mobile phones have become amazingly popular over the last few years. Most of these devices now have data capabilities such as Web browsing [1,5].Small handheld computers are becoming more crucial in our daily lives. A handheld device equipped with a browser and a wireless connection provides an opportunity to connect to the Internet at any time from anywhere. Since within a few years, most of the devic- es accessing the Web will be mobile, there is a need for developing methods and techniques that will allow satisfactory Web browsing using mobile devices [2, 6, and 7]. Technically, it has been possible to access the Internet on a mobile phone for several years already, but the mobile browsing experience has often been cumbersome for ordinary people. The conversion of standard Web pages to be used with these new devices is a challenge, as the amount of content within each of these pages is too large to be adequately displayed in these smaller display areas [4, 6]. Mobile devices have already been widely used to access the Web. However, because most available Web pages are designed for desktop PC in mind, it is inconvenient to browse these large Web pages on a mobile device due to various limitations [2, 3] such as: • Small screens of a mobile phones • Limited device memory • Limited processing power • Limited bandwidth availability It is very likely that ten years from now, most users will connect to Internet and use a mobile browser as an everyday tool. This requires that the mobile browsing user experience improves. Connection speed, number of services, and usability must increase, while cost per byte must decrease. In this paper, I present some aspects of mobile browsing usability, the existing browser conventions and researched technologies and finally a suggestion for an efficient web browsing experience on the mobile phone. Keywords- browser, usability, layout, GPRS, algorithm, thumbnail, narrow, scrolling

Citation: Minit Arora (2012) Effective Web Browsing on Mobile Phones. Journal of Information and Operations Management ISSN: 0976– 7754 & E-ISSN: 0976–7762, Volume 3, Issue 1, pp-146-148.

Copyright: Copyright©2012 Minit Arora. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Existing Browsing Conventions signed to be compatible with mobile devices [8]. Mobile devices and desktop computers have essentially different Most mobile phone models currently in the market have GPRS characteristics. connection and an internet browser. Because of the fast develop- These are e.g. mobility, display size, memory and data storage ing nature of technology, it is hard to find objective information capabilities, data transfer rate etc. [8]. The most significant is the about the current mobile browsers. Product information is market small screen size [8, 9, 10]. These differences imply that a struc- oriented and the evaluation of the browsers on the basis of market- ture which works for traditional internet web site has to be rede- ing material is difficult. All major phone produces, such as Nokia

Journal of Information and Operations Management ISSN: 0976–7754 & E-ISSN: 0976–7762 , Volume 3, Issue 1, 2012 Bioinfo Publications 146

EFFECTIVE WEB BROWSING ON MOBILE PHONES

and Sony Ericsson, have decent browsers in their devices. Some the content you are looking for comes to the view. producers even offer more than one browser model to their prod- Unfortunately, according to usability tests, there are also several ucts. For example, in addition to its own browser, Nokia offers problems with the narrow layout of Web pages. The worst problem some phones also equipped, with Opera 6.10 browser, which can is that when wide images that contain detailed information are be installed to Sony Ericsson’s models, as well. scaled to fit the screen, the details in the image cannot be seen any more. For example, texts in wide images become unreadable. Designing Browser Layout The second problem is with data tables, e.g. timetables. When a Designing a mobile browser for a small screen and with limited row does not fit onto the screen, it flows to the next row, and it is input mechanisms is a challenging task. Since most devices are hard for users to interpret which data goes together. used in various countries, it is important to understand the different Moreover since the pages are shown in long and narrow format, mobile browsing cultures and the mobile browsing experience of some elements on the pages inevitably change their order. When different target user groups. A good mobile browser should function users in desktop web are used to looking for some particular piece smoothly with all types of content, both with the content optimized of information on a certain location, it is hard for them to locate it on for mobile devices and with the Web content designed for PC the narrow layout page. It is hard to foresee at which point of the screens long tube the desired information is located. So one constantly needs to spot some keywords or items in the content on the screen Original Layout while scrolling. This means the scrolling cannot be too fast. On the In original layout, the layout is similar to what it is on desktop com- other hand, since the content tube may be really long, scrolling puter’s screen. The difference is that on a mobile device the user should be fast. But faster the scrolling, the more probable it is that can see only one piece of the page at a time, and has to scroll, the user misses the needed information and has to scroll back and both in vertical and horizontal directions, to see the contents of the forth to locate it. whole page. On typical Web pages, the leftmost column contains a list of links, The narrow layout browsers also provide a mode where the page is and the main content is located in the middle of the page. In the shown in the original designed layout. The user typically needs to narrow layout, the user has to scroll through the list of links before switch the viewing mode during the browsing session depending on getting to the main content. When moving within one site, the list of the content being viewed. links soon becomes irrelevant and scrolling through it, on every In original layout, it is easier to see the details even in large images page becomes irritating. and interpret data tables. Moreover, if the user knows the page from the PC experience, he The Algorithm Approach can navigate to the desired piece of information with minimal scroll- One approach to solve the problem of mobile web browsing is to ing effort. develop algorithms, which transform the content of web pages into But the original layout is not problem-free The worst problem is that smaller units, suitable for small screens. The web pages are down- reading wide text columns is too laborious, if the user has to scroll loaded though a proxy server to the client device On the proxy back and forth each line. server, the web pages are analyzed with varying algorithms to Moreover, because all content is as big as on the PC, the page make them fit for the mobile browser’s and mobile device’s capaci- size is big and scrolling effort may increase ty. These algorithms reorganize the navigational structure of web The usability problems of viewing Web pages in original format is sites in a way that is believed to be suitable for mobile users. similar as with any 2-dimensional content that is larger than the An example of these early approaches is a small terminal browser screen, no matter what the screen size is. Several information visu- called WEST [13]. WEST is based on cooperation between a client alization techniques have been invented for these cases, but only application (browser) and internet service provider’s proxy server. some of these focus and are applicable for the tiny displays, mod- The server first splits the content of a web page into small pieces, est input devices, and limited CPU power of mobile phones. and then it extracts links to bind the pieces together. It uses text reduction algorithms to create different kinds of views to the con- Narrow Layout tent. Client application shows the user a thumbnail view (which is a In most browsers there is the narrow layout option, which shows sort of a graphical summary), a keyword view and a link view of the the page in a long and narrow form such that it fits within the browsed page. [13]. screen’s vertical limits. The page has been decreased in horizontal Yin and Lee have presented a model, in which they first construct a direction so much that it needs to be scrolled only downwards. [12] graph of the web page by dividing the content into separate items Pictures are shrunk and elements are rearranged one below anoth- on the basis of the layout and the visual shape of the items. Yin er. Most new browsers support this technique, although it might be and Lee propose that all contents on a web page should not and called differently depending on the producer. For example, Opera need not be shown to a mobile user. This would save not only load- Inc. calls the technique Small-Screen Rendering [11].web browsers ing time, but also the time that the user needs to browse through and NetFront browser calls it SmartFit. Nokia calls it narrow layout, the page. Moreover the processing capacity of the mobile device since the content forms a narrow and tall tube. would not have to be that big. [14] Yin and Lee say that according The main benefit of the narrow layout is that text is easy to read: If to their experiments, they had to deliver only 39% of the objects on a text column were wider than the screen, it would be much harder a web page to gain 85% of the content that the users wanted to to read it. Moreover, it is simple to just scroll down and eventually see. This is done by calculating the probability of the user to be-

Journal of Information and Operations Management ISSN: 0976–7754 & E-ISSN: 0976–7762 , Volume 3, Issue 1, 2012 Bioinfo Publications 147

Minit Arora

come interested in the contents of the page. The algorithm which [8] Weiss S. (2002) “Handheld usability”, Milan: John Wiley & Yin and Lee have created takes into account the size of the ele- Sons. ments (the bigger, the more important), text length (longer text [9] MacKay B. (2003) Conference on Human Factors and Compu- attract more users), matching with the link name (the elements that ting Systems Ft. Lauderdale Florida, USA pp. 684-685 match with the name of the link leading to the current page are [10] Kaikkonen A., Roto V. (2002) 4th International Symposium, more relevant) and the placement of the elements (elements in the Mobile HCI. Pisa, Italy. middle of the page are more important). The most probably inter- [11] Opera (2004) Opera software ASA. esting elements are shown first, and those parts, which are calcu- [12] Roto V. (2003) Nokia homepage featured articles. lated to be irrelevant, are excluded. Elements are finally shown as [13] Björk S., Holmquist L.E., Redström J., Bretan I., Danielsson R., in narrow layout. Those elements, that are not considered to be Karlgren J., Franzén K. (1999) 12th annual ACM symposium important, are dropped out from the narrow layout web page [14] on User interface software and technology. Asheville, North It is easy to browse the page and to navigate the site that is formed Carolina, USA, pp. 187 – 196. from such pages. The user does not need to scroll that much, and [14] Yin X., Lee W.S. (2004) 13th International conference on World the content elements are sorted so that the most interesting ones Wide Web, New York, USA, pp.338-344 come first. [15] Wobbrock J.O., Forlizzi J., Hudson S.E., Myers B.A. (2002) But the problem with this solution is, that when the users see only Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, Paris. the “shortened” version of the contents, they cannot know, whether France, pp. 205-208 the original version would have contained something extra which would have interested them. Approaches, which use algorithms for transforming the web pages, have been criticized on the basis that no algorithms can be so so- phisticated that they can process the content of web pages logical- ly. For example, Wobbrock, Forlizzi, Hudson and Myers [15] claim that web pages are too complicated to be shrunk with the assis- tance of algorithms

Conclusion Various improvements along with innovations and inventions are needed to make the web pages easily and effectively viewable on the mobile phone. The website designers, must also keep in mind certain basic tips making their sites effectively visible on small screen mobile phones such as – objects that need to be kept visi- ble at one glance should be kept small, small text in images should be avoided and the pages should be kept as light as possible. In my opinion, combining an efficient algorithm at the proxy server to logically split the content of web pages making it usably viewable on the mobile device, and a modified original browser layout would provide the best user experience for browsing web content on the small screen of a mobile phone or a handheld mobile device

References [1] Baluja S. (2006) 15th International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. 33-42, Edinburgh. [2] Chen Y., Ma W.Y. and Zhang H.J. (2003) 12th International Conference in World Wide Web pp 225-253, May 2003, Buda- pest, Hungary. [3] Xie X., Miao G., Song R., Wen J.R. and Ma W.Y. (2005) Third IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications, pp.17-26. [4] Zhigang Hua, Hanging Lu (2006) IEEE Pervasive Computing, Vol.5, pp.78-74. [5] Daniel F. Zucker, Michimasa Uernatsu, Tornihasa Karnad (2005) XTech, pp25-27. [6] Rahman F., Alam H., Hatono R. and Ariyoshi K. (2001) Sixth International Conference on Document Analysis and Recogni- tion pp. 1064-1069, Seattle, USA. [7] Alexander Blekas, John Garofalakis, Vasilios Stefanis (2006) ACM International Conference Vol. 134 pp. 79-85 2006

Journal of Information and Operations Management ISSN: 0976–7754 & E-ISSN: 0976–7762 , Volume 3, Issue 1, 2012 Bioinfo Publications 148