Designing Web Sites for PDAs

Imagine that you're riding on the local urban underground railway. It's the morning commute, and the train is packed. The stranger next to you flips methodically through the Times Tribune Chronicle in a way that lands half of the paper in your lap. You want to teach this space invader a lesson. So you tear the paper from her grasp, ball it into a mass, and squeeze with the transformative might of Superman until the lump is shaped into a perfectly readable, rectangular object that can be held comfortably in one hand. This is similar to the challenge of designing content for the PalmPilot. I came upon this analogy while designing a Wired News mini-site for the PalmPilot's AvantGo browser. During the project, I learned some fundamental guidelines that should be kept in mind when designing Web content for a PDA audience, which I'll share over the next few pages. But first I want to put in a word about the importance of the Web to the PDA.

Stowell, Carter. Webmonkey (1999). Design>Web Design>Wireless Web>PDA

Improving Web Interaction on Small Displays

Soon many people will retrieve information from the Web using handheld, palmsized or even smaller computers. Although these computers have dramatically increased in sophistication, their display size is – and will remain – much smaller than their conventional, desktop counterparts. Currently, browsers for these devices present web pages without taking account of the very different display capabilities. As part of a collaborative project with Reuters, we carried out a study into the usability impact of small displays for retrieval tasks. Users of the small screen were 50% less effective in completing tasks than the large screen subjects. Small screen users used a very substantial number of scroll activities in attempting to complete the tasks. Our study also provided us with interesting insights into the shifts in approach users seem to make when using a small screen device for retrieval.

Jones, Matt, Gary Marsden, Norliza Mohd-Nasir, Kevin Boone and George Buchanan. Eighth International WWW Conference (1999). Design>Web Design>Wireless Web>PDA

Users with Small Screens: Less than 640 x 480

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.

Chu, Kelvin Kam Wing. Universal Usability (2001). Design>Web Design>Wireless Web>PDA

Web Design Issues When Searching for Information in a Small Screen Display  

In this paper, we report preliminary findings from an experimental study in which twenty-eight users answered questions by performing strategic information searches on web pages. Pages, which varied in length from 100 to 850 words, were displayed on either a standard, desktop monitor (full-sized) or a palm handheld interface (small-screen). Overall, users took more time to perform the tasks on the small screen interface, with the break in efficacy appearing between 225 and 350 word-lengths. Finally, contrary to our hypothesis, participants were similarly accurate across conditions.

Kim, Loel and Michael J. Albers. ACM SIGDOC (2001). Presentations>Web Design>Wireless Web>PDA