UNIVERSAL USABILITY IN PRACTICE

The purpose of small screen devices is different from traditional computers. Information that is displayed on the screen should be essential. In general, this means information that a user will access regularly or will urgently require in certain situations. Of course, different people have different needs, so you certainly want to keep your audience in mind as well.

When you put information into a group of hypertext pages, you have to strike a balance between the depth of the page hierarchy and the length of the individual pages. Given the smaller screens, designers should try to keep one topic per page. This is primarily because it can be difficult to scroll through a lengthy section of text using the scroll bar.

For example, consider a shopping site with many products. It is better to place each product in its own page rather than placing them all together. If splitting is undesirable, named anchors should be used to mark sections. It is also suggested to maintain links to each product in a table of contents at the top of the file.

When the layout is designed, we have to pay attention to some problems. For example, the main reason that some pages on the web don't display well on small screen is that their designers used some features that are not supported efficiently by small screen. For example, big images, frames, multi-columns are not displayed well in small screen with low resolution.

Another problem of small screens with low resolution is navigation. Excessive scrolling is needed to move about the page, meaning that users will often not see the entire page because of the extra effort. Scrolling is known to cause problems even on normal computer screens, and users with small screens will have even worse problems since they will need to scroll more. Since users have to scroll the text much more often, it is more difficult to get an overview of the text. Four-way-scrolling is very annoying because the users have to scroll the display in each line of the text. Two-way-scrolling (only up and down) may lead to less beautiful results but it is easier to read. It is also much more comfortable.

Moreover, users often get lost within a single page. It happens because there is no way of knowing how far they have scrolled down the page or what other information is on the page. In particular, the users will feel annoyed when it is impossible to get an idea of the structure of a page or to predict what else they might see further down the page. These problems also exist in large-screen browsers, but because more content can be seen at any one time and because less effort is needed to scroll about the page, the usability consequences are much less severe. Users need help to understand the structure of the page when they are confined to looking at a very small piece at a time. A properly constructed HTML page should have an inherent structure in the form of nested headings (H1, H2, H3, etc.). 

According to the characteristics and the problem of the small screen with low resolution above, the goal of design for small screen with low resolution are:

• Achieve a sufficiently compact presentation without sacrificing the readability of the content.
• Keep the pages simple and elegant. Focus on the content of the information, but not the display.
• Facilitate the users to efficiently understand the content by small screen with low resolution.
• Present information in manner that is clear, concise, and easy to navigate.
• Facilitate the users to navigate through the information and controls without getting lost.