Metrics for the Evaluation of News Site Content Layout in Large-Screen Contexts

摘要

Despite the fact that screen sizes and average screen resolutions have dramatically increased over the past few years, little attention has been paid to the design of web sites for large, high-resolution displays that are now becoming increasingly used both in enterprise and consumer spaces. We present a study of how the visual area of the browser window is currently utilised by news web sites at different widescreen resolutions. The analysis includes measurements of space taken up by the article content, embedded ads and the remaining components as they appear in the viewport of the web browser. The results show that the spatial distribution of page elements does not scale well with larger viewing sizes, which leads to an increasing amount of unused screen real estate and unnecessary scrolling. We derive a number of device-sensitive metrics to measure the quality of web page layout in different viewing contexts, which can guide the design of flexible layout templates that scale effectively on large screens.