Customisation of web content for desktop and mobile devices

Abstract

Accessing websites from mobile devices has been gaining popularity but may not give the same results and experiences as accessing them from a personal computer. Growth in the use of mobile devices is accelerating and therefore issues with accessing the web from them are becoming increasingly important. To investigate problems users encountered while accessing websites from mobile devices we conducted a series of surveys and conducted a user trial. Results showed that on mobile devices, users get pages with different structure, terminology, content, and location of content than those on the desktops. Each of these differences negatively impact on the user experience for the site. To address these issues, we present a server-side adaptation approach to prioritising adaptive pages to different devices through a prioritisation system. The prioritisation approach allows users to prioritise page items for different devices. The prioritisation engine reorders, shows, and removes items based on its priority set by users or developers. With this approach, the overall web page’s structure (the parent-child relationships) is preserved and the same terminology, content, and similar location of content are delivered to all devices. To evaluate the prioritisation system, we conducted user trials in a controlled lab-experiment evaluating the usability and user experience of adaptive pages developed for desktops and prioritised for mobile devices. We compared adaptive pages of a mock Facebook to the actual Facebook version. We also conducted a performance test analysing the performance of the prioritisation engine. Results demonstrate the usefulness of the Prioritisation engine and the adaptive pages. Participants preferred the Prioritised version and their performance and browsing experience on the Prioritised version is better than that on the Facebook mobile version. Results show that adaptive pages and prioritisation provides a consistent web experience across different devices.