UNIVERSAL USABILITY IN PRACTICE
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Users with Small Screens - Less than 640 x 480

Kelvin Kam Wing Chu (kchu@cs.umd.edu)
Department of Computer Science
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742 USA
April 2001

Introduction
In recent years, it becomes popular for people to use some devices with small and low resolution screen to access the information on the Internet. For example, in Finland, 60% people use mobile phones to connect to the Internet. Other products include personal digital assistants (PDA), WebTV and embedded web browsers inside automobiles. Some of them like PDAs are popular and play an important role in some people's daily life. Service providers have already started to provide information such as news, traffic situation, online maps and entertainment guides to users through these devices. The screen size of these devices is generally small. WebTV is 544 x 372; hand-held PCs is around 240 x 320 and popular palm-sized PDA is about 160 x 160. Products like mobile phones can be as low as 48 x 48.

The World Wide Web (WWW) contains a huge amount of pages for people to find their useful material. However, most of these pages are designed to be displayed by computers with large and high resolution screens. When users with small and low resolution screens see these pages, many problems occurs, making the Web surfing experience very unsatisfactory. Thus, new techniques and guidelines are needed to design web pages under the constraints of small display. The next section addresses the problem of web surfing by small screen. Moreover, we will discuss the goal of web page design for small screen.

 

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