Adapting Web Page Tables on Mobile Devices

  • Authors:

  • Yaswanth Potla;Ramakanth Annadi;Jun Kong;Gursimran Walia;Kendall Nygard

  • Affiliations:

  • North Dakota State University, USA;North Dakota State University, USA;North Dakota State University, USA;North Dakota State University, USA;North Dakota State University, USA

  • Venue:
  • International Journal of Handheld Computing Research
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

The usage of PDA and mobile devices has dramatically increased recently. However, mobile devices and PDA devices have a limited screen size, which makes it frustrating to browse tabular data on mobile devices since users have to frequently scroll up and down to find the information of interest. This paper presents an efficient means to present HTML-based tables on mobile devices. Based on the column and row headers, the authors adapt a HTML-based Web table into two adaptive styles. The first style displays all information of a table into a single narrow page to avoid horizontal scrolling; and the second style distributes information to different sub-pages, each of which approximately occupies the whole mobile screen, and thus eliminates scrolling. The approach is empirically evaluated using a controlled experiment. The main conclusions derived from the empirical study are: 1 the adaptive layout styles improves the browsing efficiency for individual subjects as compared to HTML web page style, 2 the single narrow adaptive layout resulted in the improved browsing efficiency compared to the multi-page adaptive layout for one-dimensional HTML web page tables, and 3 the multi-page adaptive layout was more efficient than the single narrow adaptive layout for two-dimensional HTML tables.