MeRCMcMaster eBusiness Research Centre

Scrolling Versus Menus on Small Mobile Device Screens: A Mobile Portal Usability Study

Working Paper #24 by Bruce Wu, Fang Cao and Norm Archer, July 2008.

  • Wireless device interfaces are harder to make acceptable than desktop ones.
  • Wireless Web portals offered one way to provide application access.
  • The study used reusable portlets supporting functions through wireless PDAs.

Method

  • Two PDA interfaces were built for an organizational application.
  • One made every function available by scrolling.
  • The other used five portlets in separate displays linked by menus.
  • Users compared a desktop display, the scrollable PDA and the menu PDA.

Result

  • Users preferred the desktop interface.
  • They ranked the menu-driven and scrollable PDA versions indifferently.

Updated