Andrei Popescu

Minimap: a web page visualization method for mobile phones

The Web has become available even on mobile phones, but the current methods to view large pages on small screens have not been highly usable. Current mobile phone browsers reformat Web pages to a single column that fits the screen width. Because not all content is comprehensible in this format, browsers provide a second mode for viewing pages in the same layout as on a PC. We have developed a modeless Web page visualization method called Minimap that shows pages in a modified Original layout. We conducted a long-term usability study with 20 participants to compare the state-of-the-art mobile phone browser with this new method. 18 participants preferred the new method, and it also scored better in more detailed usability ratings.

Auto-update: a concept for automatic downloading of web content to a mobile device

Internet content is increasingly available for mobile users. Mobile devices are capable of delivering not only full Web pages but also other Web content such as podcasts and RSS feeds. Today, cost, speed of data transfer, and network coverage are among the biggest remaining concerns for mobile Web users. It would be useful to have the interesting content readily available on the device when the user wants to access it. Battery and memory limitations together with the cost of data transfer require delicate content prefetching, as loading content carelessly could result in overloading of device resources and a huge phone bill. This article introduces an Auto-update concept that lets the users control the costs and the mobile device resources by means of high level profiles that hide underlying complexity from the users. We tested the usefulness of the Auto-update prototype in a smallscale field study, and the results indicate that Auto-update is especially useful for prefetching feeds.