Small screen devices, such as PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) allow users to access information anytime, anywhere. People are now able to begin a task on their desktop, continue the task on their laptop and finish it on their PDA. As people switch between devices, the information must also be migrated while being sensitive to the limitations of the target device. The migration of information to a PDA and its small screen potentially can change the information, either in appearance or in actual content.
This poster session will explore this problem in the context of users going between devices while performing web-based tasks, such as re-finding information, finding new information, reading and general browsing. In particular, we will focus on three common approaches to displaying web pages on small screen devices: Direct Migration, Linear and Overview. We will introduce an Overview method, the Gateway, that exploits a user’s familiarity of a web page to allow us to reduce a web page to fit within one screen on the PDA with a zooming capacity to expand sections of the page. We will present results of a pilot study where we found that users prefer the Gateway over the Linear approach for many web-based tasks, despite the common approach of linearizing or creating condensed hierarchies of web information for PDAs. We will introduce factors that influence the transformation of web information and will describe further studies.