Automatic Usability Evaluation of Mobile Web Pages with XML

Abstract

Recently, mobile browsing on the World Wide Web is growing rapidly. The growth has created a surge in the number of Web pages designed for mobile devices. To increase the usability of mobile browsing, the Mobile Web Best Practices have been proposed to guide the development of mobile-friendly Web pages. In this paper, the mobileOK checker, a free service provided by W3C, is used to automatically inspect the conformance of 46 popular mobile Web sites to the Mobile Web Best Practices. We analyze the evaluation results and provide suggestions for improving the design of mobile Web sites. In mobile browsing, different mobile devices have different screen sizes, layout structures, and styles to represent Web contents. Furthermore, mobile devices are developing fast. The diversity and fast development of mobile devices cause the mobile design guidelines changing over time. However, the mobileOK checker is not flexible to include new guidelines or customize a best practice rule to fit a specific mobile browsing scenario. To solve this problem, this paper presents a generic approach to represent the mobile design guidelines through an XML schema. Using the XML schema provides the flexibly to support evolving guidelines in an open format. To evaluate our approach, a prototype, WPChecker, has been developed.