Annotation and Auto-Scrolling for Web Page Overview in Mobile Web Browsing

Abstract

Due to advances in mobile phones, mobile Web browsing has become increasingly popular. In this regard, small screens and poor input capabilities of mobile phones prevent users from comfortably browsing Web pages that are designed for desktop PCs. One of the serious problems of mobile Web browsing is that users often get lost in a Web page and can only view a small portion of a Web page at a time, not able to grasp the entire page’s structure to decide which direction their information of interest is located. To solve this problem, an effective technique is to present an overview of the page. Although prior studies adopted the conventional style of overview, that is, a scaled-down image of the page, this is not sufficient because users cannot see details of the contents. Therefore, in this paper, the authors present annotations on a Web page that provides a functionality which automatically scrolls the page. Results of a user experiment show that annotations are informative for users who want to find contents from a large Web page.