"Analysis of Web Content Delivered to a Mobile Computing Environment"
Anthony PerreaultAnthony Perreault is a senior at New Mexico Tech, majoring in Technical Communication with an emphasis in computer science and web design. While taking classes, Anthony also works full-time at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Pete V. Domenici Science Operations Center as an operations specialist for the Very Long Baseline Array radio telescope where part of his duties include maintaining and upgrading operational documentation. Anthony worked with Dr. Julie Dyke Ford on his senior thesis project, Analysis of Web Content Delivered to a Mobile Computing Environment.
ContentsBackground of Wireless Technology Selection of Sites for Analysis |
Suggestions for Further ResearchMy research can be used as a starting point for future scholars in their research into the delivery of content within the mobile environment. One area of research would be to take the sites from the survey that I found unusable and redesign them specifically for the mobile user. Sites such as Craigslist and Wikipedia, for example, could be designed for the mobile user. Craigslist could take advantage of the built-in positioning that mobile devices come with and provide content that is targeted for the location of the user. Wikipedia could use Google’s mobile page as a model and provide a simple front-end that is little more than a search field with a submission button. Once the sites have been redesigned then an evaluation should be conducted on how improved the usability of the redesigned site is within the mobile environment. Another area of research would be to perform another survey and analysis several years from now to see if more sites have recognized and altered content delivery for the mobile user. Examples here would be the web portal sites such as Yahoo!, Time Warner’s rr.com and others. These sites are content-heavy and while usable on a desktop or laptop environment, they are almost currently impossible to use in the mobile environment. These could be redesigned similar to CNN’s mobile site to deliver current news or weather with a login and password field. Once inside, the user could then use current Web 2.0 practices to organize the content to how they would like to see it displayed. A survey could be performed, this one deep rather than shallow. A comparison could be made against web sites of a selected genre, such as news sites, entertainment sites, or shopping sites in how content is delivered to a mobile device. Does the content lose context once past the initial home page of the site? How easy is it to perform online shopping on a mobile device from Amazon, WalMart, and Target? Once Flash is supported, how good is the streaming video and audio quality? Are there significant signal dropouts as the user is handed off from one cell to another while watching the latest episode of House from Hulu?
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