visual interface designed for web documents on mobile devices

Abstract:

Designing an effective interface for mobile devices to reduce difficulties in navigating information on small displays is a challenging task and an area of active study. This project developed a prototype system that generates a thumbnail of a web page through the use of visual abstraction consisting of visualized icons and simplified images. This graphical illustration of a web page compactly shows the structural layout, constituting web contents, and distributional pattern of search terms in a web document. The system can present multiple web page thumbnails simultaneously which allow it to be an effective tool for exploratory search. The viability of using the proposed visual interface was demonstrated through usability testing. The participants expressed their satisfaction in many features of the proposed system for browsing web documents on a mobile device. The proposed visualization will increase a user’s effectiveness in web browsing on a mobile device by alleviating the need to reference irrelevant information.

Collaborators:

• Benjamin Aeschliman
• Dr. Beomjin Kim

Related Publications:

• Beomjin Kim, Benjamin Aeschliman, “A Technique for Creating Visually Abstracted Geometric Thumbnails of Web Documents for Mobile Devices,” International Journal of Digital Content Technology and its Applications, 6(13), pp. 470-481, 2012.
• Beomjin Kim, Benjamin Aeschliman, “Experimental Assessment of a Visual Interface Designed for Web Documents on Mobile Devices,” Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Computer Sciences and Convergence Information Technology, pp. 231-236, 2011.