Screen Size Of Mobile Devices Research Articles

The influence of snippet length on user behavior in mobile web search

PurposeWeb search is more and more moving into mobile contexts. However, screen size of mobile devices is limited and search engine result pages face a trade-off between offering informative snippets and optimal use of space. One factor clearly influencing this trade-off is snippet length. The purpose of this paper is to find out what snippet size to use in mobile web search.Design/methodology/approachFor this purpose, an eye-tracking experiment was conducted showing participants search interfaces with snippets of one, three or five lines on a mobile device to analyze 17 dependent variables. In total, 31 participants took part in the study. Each of the participants solved informational and navigational tasks.FindingsResults indicate a strong influence of page fold on scrolling behavior and attention distribution across search results. Regardless of query type, short snippets seem to provide too little information about the result, so that search performance and subjective measures are negatively affected. Long snippets of five lines lead to better performance than medium snippets for navigational queries, but to worse performance for informational queries.Originality/valueAlthough space in mobile search is limited, this study shows that longer snippets improve usability and user experience. It further emphasizes that page fold plays a stronger role in mobile than in desktop search for attention distribution.

A Study of the Effect of Doughnut Chart Parameters on Proportion Estimation Accuracy

AbstractPie and doughnut charts nicely convey the part–whole relationship and they have become the most recognizable chart types for representing proportions in business and data statistics. Many experiments have been carried out to study human perception of the pie chart, while the corresponding aspects of the doughnut chart have seldom been tested, even though the doughnut chart and the pie chart share several similarities. In this paper, we report on a series of experiments in which we explored the effect of a few fundamental design parameters of doughnut charts, and additional visual cues, on the accuracy of such charts for proportion estimates. Since mobile devices are becoming the primary devices for casual reading, we performed all our experiments on such device. Moreover, the screen size of mobile devices is limited and it is therefore important to know how such size constraint affects the proportion accuracy. For this reason, in our first experiment we tested the chart size and we found that it has no significant effect on proportion accuracy. In our second experiment, we focused on the effect of the doughnut chart inner radius and we found that the proportion accuracy is insensitive to the inner radius, except the case of the thinnest doughnut chart. In the third experiment, we studied the effect of visual cues and found that marking the centre of the doughnut chart or adding tick marks at 25% intervals improves the proportion accuracy. Based on the results of the three experiments, we discuss the design of doughnut charts and offer suggestions for improving the accuracy of proportion estimates.

How Handheld Mobile Device Size and Hand Location May Affect Divided Attention

Previous research demonstrates that people increasingly utilize multiple displays along with mobile devices simultaneously, and that this split in attention has detrimental effects on goal-directed behavior. However, few studies have assessed the impact of the physical attributes of mobile devices–including dimensions, weight and screen size–on attention. Understanding how device dimensions and screen size affect attention is an important first step in creating safety guidelines for high risk industries that utilize displays, such as automotive and aeronautics engineering. The aim of this work is to determine to what extent the display dimensions and screen size of mobile devices influence attention. To explore this question, participants interacted with mobile devices of varying sizes while performing a change detection task on a stationary device located behind and above the mobile device. Results of this study suggest that those using a smaller mobile device achieved higher performance on the background change detection task than those using a larger device, while having similar performance in the mobile device task. This work demonstrates that when attention is divided, larger displays may be more attentionally demanding. We recommend that when users or designers are required to consider multitasking between a foreground and background task, in order to optimize background performance they should utilize smaller foreground displays.

Off-Screen Landmarks on Mobile Devices: Levels of Measurement and the Perception of Distance on Resized Icons

While bringing portability and convenience to their users, the small screen size of mobile devices raises the concern that it might impact a user’s acquisition of spatial knowledge. Visualizing information of off-screen objects on mobile device has thus been introduced as a possible way to overcome this problem. Some approaches encode the distance to off-screen objects very well, but they have not considered the identities of objects, which could serve as easily-recognizable landmarks of recognition. Other approaches have addressed the visualization of distant objects’ identities as landmarks, but they have not considered the representation of distance to their actual locations. Following these approaches, this study introduces the use of visual variable size in the design of symbols for off-screen landmarks to translate both information about both direction and distance. To further investigate the efficiency of using these graduated size symbols, we apply ratio and ordinal levels of measurement to assign size to the symbols. Results show, size at the ordinal level leads to higher efficiency in understanding distance to off-screen locations. Both designs, however, yield challenges in participants’ understanding of distance based on the symbol’s size. As the initial step of investigating the use of visual variables in the design of symbols for off-screen landmarks, we suggest more visual variables be considered in follow-up designs to provide a more comprehensive understanding regarding the effectiveness of visualizing off-screen landmarks on mobile devices.

Modelling touch-interaction time on smartphones

ABSTRACTAccurate performance models are important for interaction technique, application, and hardware design. The limited screen size of mobile devices and use of touch interaction require unique considerations, especially when interacting with large amounts of information. This paper considers the performance impact of target visibility on mobile smartphone applications that provide on- and offscreen content with the commonly used direct-touch interactions and four cursor-based interaction methods for precise selection. Three existing and 12 novel performance models are experimentally validated. Fitts' Law, which was not designed for modelling selection of offscreen targets, did not predict interaction times for mobile interaction methods as accurately as is commonly observed with desktop interaction with onscreen targets. Target visibility was found to greatly impact interaction times (particularly for direct-touch interaction). The presented models that incorporate variables related to target visibility greatly improve predicted interaction times. The use and merits of the top models are discussed, emphasizing the importance and implications of accepted user-interface design guidelines.

워키태깅 : 스마트폰 환경에서 음성기반의 효과적인 영상 콘텐츠 어노테이션 방법에 관한 연구

The rapid growth and dissemination of touch-based mobile devices such as smart phones and tablet PCs, gives numerous benefits to people using a variety of multimedia contents. Due to its portability, it enables users to watch a soccer game, search video from YouTube, and sometimes tag on contents on the road. However, the limited screen size of mobile devices and touch-based character input methods based on this, are still major problems of searching and tagging multimedia contents. In this paper, we propose WalkieTagging, which provides a much more intuitive way than that of previous one. Just like any other previous video tagging services, WalkieTagging, as a voice-based annotation service, supports inserting detailed annotation data including start time, duration, tags, with little effort of users. To evaluate our methods, we developed the Android-based WalkieTagging application and performed user study via a two-week. Through our experiments by a total of 46 people, we observed that experiment participator think our system is more convenient and useful than that of touch-based one. Consequently, we found out that voice-based annotation methods can provide users with much convenience and satisfaction than that of touch-based methods in the mobile environments.

Impact of Applying Aggregate Query Processing in Mobile Commerce

With the increased usage of mobile devices, society is seeing more and more users doing transactions wirelessly. Often, data from a single server may not be sufficient. Rather, data may need to be manipulated and to be gathered from multiple remote servers before useful information can be formed. Mobile transactions are constrained by small screen size of mobile devices, high communication cost, and high memory consumption. Existing techniques from traditional query processing in distributed environments cannot be directly applied to mobile environments. In this paper, the authors propose techniques for processing mobile queries that address the issue of high memory consumption. A set of walkthrough examples was provided and performances of various techniques were examined. The results show that the technique of first downloading primary keys only from one server and then sending a query to the second server using these primary keys before processing for qualified match in the second server gives the best performance.