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Summary thumbnails: readable overviews for small screen web browsers

Published: 02 April 2005 Publication History

Abstract

In order to display web pages designed for desktop-sized monitors, some small-screen web browsers provide single-column or thumbnail views. Both have limitations. Single-column views affect page layouts and require users to scroll significantly more. Thumbnail views tend to reduce contained text beyond readability, so differentiating visually similar areas requires users to zoom. In this paper, we present Summary Thumbnails-thumbnail views enhanced with readable text fragments. Summary Thumbnails help users identify viewed material and distinguish between visually similar areas. In our user study, participants located content in web pages about 41% faster and with 71% lower error rates when using the Summary Thumbnail interface than when using the Single-Column interface, and zoomed 59% less than when using the Thumbnail interface. Nine of the eleven participants preferred Summary Thumbnails over both the Thumbnail and Single-Column interfaces.

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Word frequency list from http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/ ucrel/bncfreq/lists/6_1_1_all_tag.txt

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '05: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2005
    928 pages
    ISBN:1581139985
    DOI:10.1145/1054972
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    Published: 02 April 2005

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    Author Tags

    1. PDA
    2. overview
    3. semantic zoomingblutwurst
    4. small screen device
    5. thumbnail view
    6. web browsing

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    CHI '05 Paper Acceptance Rate 93 of 372 submissions, 25%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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    • (2023)Empirical Grounding for the Interpretations of Natural User Interface: A Case Study on SmartpenHuman-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 202310.1007/978-3-031-42283-6_20(350-371)Online publication date: 25-Aug-2023
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