A Web Browsing Method on Handheld Touch Screen Devices for Preventing from Tapping Unintended Links

摘要

In recent years, it is common thing to browse Web pages with mobile devices, such as smart phones. However, users sometimes tap the wrong link when they scroll or zoom web pages because of the relatively small display area of mobile device and sensitivity of touch screen. In such case, it is necessary to stop of loading the page or back to the previous page after the page changed. It seems that above unintended operation might increase the total browsing time and user's frustration. In this study, we aimed to prevent users from tapping unintended links for effectively web browsing with touch-screen mobile devices. The proposed method has two kind of operation mode. They are a tapping mode and non-tapping mode. With the tapping mode, users can tap the link and change the mode only. On the other hand, with the non-tapping mode, users can do swipe, pinch, and mode change operation but they cannot tap any links. Furthermore, mode change operation, we adopt the Bezel Swipe operation, is intuitive and efficient. The results of the experimental evaluation showed that the rate of tapping the unintended links with the proposed method was lower than that with conventional method. However, the task completion time with proposed method is longer than that with conventional method.