Usability study on mobile Web newspaper sites

Abstract

Despite the explosion of mobile web on various devices, its interface is rather primitive due to the limited space available and it seems that the richness of interface studies for the desktop web display has not been adopted for the mobile web. To address this gap, we reviewed 775 American newspaper mobile web sites in terms of their space usage for important contents. The descriptive statistics showed various aspects of the selected mobile newspaper sites: the number of content words, percentage of advertising space, percentage of content image, location of content image, URL hiding, weather information, link to the full site, timestamp for individual articles, current date and time information, search box and search link. The inferential statistics showed the relationships between the number of content words and other aspects of mobile homepages. We identified various space wasting interfaces such as not hiding URL box, menu-only homepage, and too much advertising spaces. We also suggested necessary features such as weather information and current date and time. Issues on preference of mobile web to “apps,” search options and links to the “full” sites were addressed as well.