Web Clipping: Compression Heuristics for Displaying Text on a PDA
Pedro de Carvalho Gomes, Sérgio Tostão, Daniel Jorge Viegas Gonçalves, Joaquim Armando Jorge · 2001
While there is strong motivation to do so, reading Web pages on portable devices still leaves much to be desired. Most solutions need special versions of Web sites and do not cope adequately with resource limits of PDAs, in particular their small screen, which makes it difficult to display large amounts of information in a usable manner. We describe an approach that provides greater flexibility to users in selecting information they want displayed, while coping with display limitations by analyzing content and organizing it into abstract visualization levels. The user can zoom in and out successive levels of detail and navigate the content without being overwhelmed by clutter. We have developed heuristics for filtering text though task analysis and usability studies, whose results are described here. These studies provided meaningful insights to help us explore trade-offs between information filtering (and therefore text compression) and text comprehension.