UNIVERSAL USABILITY IN PRACTICE

 Users with small screens - less than 640 x 480     
Introduction Recommendations Guidelines Websites Research Resources
Examples of Successful Websites
Yahoo! Mobile (mobile.yahoo.com) provides very rich information about web access by PDA and mobile phones. It contain directory services for people to look up web site that are dedicated to PDA or mobile phone access. For example, go to http://mobile.yahoo.com/phone/dir. Different links to web sites that support mobile phone browsing are well classified there. Moreover, Yahoo! itself also supports access by mobile phone. For example, if you go to http://mobile.yahoo.com/phone/land?.pv=dd&.dev=phone, you will learn a lot of information such as driving direction, news, restaurant and weather. A screen shot is shown below.

The advantage of the Yahoo! site for mobile access is:

  • The layout is compact and clear.
  • No horizontal scrolling is required.
  • The navigation structure is simple and easy to follow.
  • No extra fancy features are used.

Another web site that has the same advantages is ABC News (abcnews.com/index.html)

Yahoo also supports web access from PDA. A screen shot is shown below.

The advantage of the Yahoo! site for PDA access is:

  • The layout is compact and clear.
  • No horizontal scrolling is required.
  • The navigation structure is simple and easy to follow.
  • Small images are used.
  • The images themselves are not beauty aids. They indicate meaning that aids the browsing.
  • Each image has an alternate text.

AnyBrowser.com (www.anybrowser.com/ScreenSizeTest.html) provides a test for web site under small screen constraints. After the URL of the web site and the size of the display are specified, a screen of the size specified will display the web site. It is very useful to test whether the site is well designed for small screen. For example, when the web page of our CS department is tested, we find that it is not suitable for WebTV. Because big images and frames are used, the user can hardly see the content of the web page.

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