"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 |
Selection of Sites for AnalysisOf the 49 sites extracted from the survey, I selected eight sites to analyze. I selected those sites that I felt represent the best—and the worst—of content that might be delivered to a mobile device. I also selected sites that I thought the mobile user might access. Three of the sites, google.com (Internet search engine), flickr.com (online photo hosting site), and walmart.com (commerce) optimized content for mobile users. These sites were selected based in part on their ranking but also from the services that they provide. Google is perhaps the Internet search engine of choice by users and often the first stop by a user looking for information on the Internet. Flickr, an online photo-hosting site, allows users to upload their own photos and organize virtual photo albums. Walmart, while not in the top 22 sites, has a very large presence in the US economy and retail sales. All of these sites were excellent in their usability. The three sites I selected that were marginal in their usability are wikipedia.org (online knowledge base), wordpress.com (blog content provider), and the nytimes.com (online version of the NY Times newspaper). For many people Wikipedia is the second stop after Google when trying to find information on topics from the Internet. Wordpress provides blogging software as well as being a blog hosting provider; while probably not as large as Blogger or LiveJournal, Wordpress is considered to be one of the better blogging software developers. The NY Times online site is a source of news for many people. The two sites I selected that failed in usability in the mobile environment are craigslist.com (online bulletin board site) and imdb.com (online movie database). Craigslist is probably one of the easiest sites to code, being little more than tables with links, yet even a simple design can break down in a mobile environment. The Internet Movie DataBase (IMDB) is an online repository for movie and actor/actress information. The complexity of this site, while it works on a large display, turns into a mush of images and impossible-to-read text in the mobile environment. |
Pages: 1· 2· 3· 4· 5· 6· 7· 8· 9· 10· 11· 12· 13· 14· 15· 16· 17· 18· 19