There are thousands of generic websites that are out there today which are not specifically designed to suite mobile devices. In an era where smart mobile devices getting more and more popularity and range of devices are getting increased day by day, it has become essential to present these generic websites in mobile user friendly manner. Otherwise most of these generic websites would eventually become obsolete.
Our final year undergraduate research project is based on solving the aforementioned issue through a new visualization paradigm that can create useful presentations out of generic web contents.
The generic view of a website rendered in a desktop web browser is not the ideal way presenting it in the mobile browser. Therefore the team identified the importance of introducing a new visualization technique to present web pages in mobile devices. It would be more effective to provide a summarized content to the user with links provided to view the actual content. The important concept underlying this project is the separation of generic website designing and its’ presentation in mobile web browsers. The extension or the tool will have the capability to transcode any generic HTML page to an appropriate view for the mobile device. This visualization technique will be integrated with smart touch features and haptic technologies. Therefore it has the potential to be a user friendly format for the visually impaired users as well.
The use of smart mobile devices has been increasing exponentially worldwide. With the rapid rate of technology innovation in the mobile industry, these devices are getting more and more equipped with performance, memory and graphics comparable to computers and laptops. Their smart touch features has enabled mobile applications to provide a phenomenal experience to the users.But the mobile web browsers have not been able to provide the same level of user experience. Most of the current HTML based websites are not tailored to provide the best experience to the mobile user. The site owners are already concerned with accommodating dependencies in different browser platforms for desktop comers. Support for mobile browsing increases the complexity as mobile browsers are limited in their capabilities, and even the extents of those limitations vary greatly between devices. The device dependent features such as the screen size should also be considered in the mobile version. Thus it has become a tradeoff for the site owners between enhancing mobile user experience and the cost of these customization for the mobile browsers. Therefore we see only a limited number of websites which has a mobile version. As a solution, the website adaptation techniques are used to render mobile friendly views out of generic web pages. But none of these existing solutions have utilized the smart touch features to enhance the browsing experience to the mobile user.
