A mobile phone is very different browsing device from a PC.
the most important differences specific to the mobile device and mobile browsing include
the display, keys, memory space, processing power, and battery life.
Display:
The most obvious difference between PC browsing and mobile browsing is the screen size.
The users seemed to appreciate the PDA/Communicator screen size, but
thought that browsing on any smaller screen would be unusable. When we spoke to
smart phone users, the comments were very similar: surprisingly, phone users had few
complaints about the small screen size but they thought that browsing on any smaller screen
would be unusable. Rather than complaining about the screen size, many users complained
about some web pages that did not take small screen browsing into account.
Even on PDA and Communicator, users suffered from a keyhole view problem: they did not
know how large the page is, and where the target content is located. On PDA, this was
mainly because the pages were intact, shown exactly in the same format as on the PC. On
relatively low resolution screens of the PDAs, 1:1 text size was even too big for close
viewing.The display resolution and contrast improve text readability a lot. We have recently run a few user studies with the latest Nokia phone prototypes, introducing a display of 352x416
pixels, physical size being no more than 35 x 41.5 mm. The browser users are amazed about
the display quality and their ability to read even tiny texts on it. In these cases, the display
quality, not only its size, was a clear factor affecting mobile browsing usability.
In addition to a high quality display, the browser software can provide a visualization
method that alleviates the small screen problems
Keys
In addition to the display, the limited keypad on mobile phones is an obvious difference
between mobile browsing and desktop browsing. It was interesting to notice in Japan that a
17-year old male who did not use a PC at all, saw the phone keypad so simple and handy for
him that he would prefer to use it over the “complicated” PC keyboard. This might be a
Japanese peculiarity, but maybe there will be more opinions like this in the emerging
markets where the phone is many times the only device used for accessing the Internet.
For users of limited keypad devices, we have seen that entering a URL is the most painful
text entry task, and the browser should provide all possible aids to help typing in the URL.
When the browser provided auto-complete for URLs, our interviewees entered the
beginning of the URL and picked the familiar address from a proposed list. Here again, we
were surprised that the URL entry pattern was copied from the PC browser. This usage
pattern seems to function better than bookmarking pages and finding the bookmark, even
when the keypad is limited.
Also search engines are used a lot even on limited keypads. Search is used a lot
on a PC, and the lack of a proper keypad does not preclude users’ search habits on a mobile
phone.
No pointing device
Web pages are designed for mouse interaction, and an increasing number of pages include
image maps or show more content when the mouse pointer is on top of an item by
recognizing a ‘mouse over’ event. Mobile phones typically do not provide a pointing device,
but the focus moves from link to link or from form item to item when the user scrolls the
page with a joystick or scrolling keys.
The users in our contextual interviews who used a Nokia Communicator that provides an
arrow pointer controlled by a rocker key did not always like this control, since it was harder
to move the pointer than focus on top of a link. This may be a matter of the input control,
because a joystick-type mouse control is widely used on laptops (e.g. IBM TrackPoint).
Browser access
The time and number of clicks required to get to the first relevant web page on a mobile
browser has an effect on mobile browsing user experience, because a mobile browser is
many times used for finding a specific piece of information quickly. Outside Finland, many
operators bundle the phone and the operator subscription, and have specific adjustments
done to the phone user interface. Typically, these operators want to provide a dead easy
access to their WAP portal, even by providing a dedicated key for that.
The participants recruited to our studies use the mobile browser relatively often, and most of
them seemed to have a quick enough access to the browser. Either the device provided a
hard key for the browser, or a softkey function available in the basic, idle state of the phone.
The rest accessed the list of applications to start up the browser.
If the shortcut is available in one of the softkeys in the idle state of the mobile phone, it is
very likely that a majority of users will test the function. If the first time use provides a
positive user experience, a majority of users may continue using the Internet on phone. The
threat is that if the user is not keen on mobile browsing, s/he has to find a way to map the
soft key to a more useful function.