Experimental assessment of a visual interface designed for web documents on mobile devices

The use of mobile devices as vital equipment for accessing information on-demand will continue to grow. Presenting requested information effectively on a small screen device is a challenging yet important area of active study. We have developed a prototype system that produces an outline of a web page through visual abstraction. This graphical illustration visualizes the structural layout, characteristics of components, and distributional pattern of search terms in a web document compactly and intuitively. Unlike traditional approaches that display an overview of a web document with an image-based thumbnail, the proposed system shows information using geometric shapes which decrease the data required to present the information. A usability test evaluating users' acceptance of the visualized web contents was conducted. In several areas the participants showed a higher degree of satisfaction using the proposed approach to address the difficulties in exploring web documents on a small screen device. Participants also expressed their preferences and opinions which will be valuable resources in finding future research directions.