Using Zooming Applications for Mobile Devices

Although mobile devices, cellular phones, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and other handheld devices have hardware constraints such as small screen, small storage, low CPU speed, and low resolution, their popularity has been enormously increasing. This is enhancing the opportunities for researchers to overcome those open problems caused of small size hardware constraints. However, still the biggest difficulty is that these devices are too difficult to load today’s visual information because most current information is based on a large visual documentation. How do we present information effectively on mobile devices? This is a main challenge for mobile interface developers since viewing is becoming more and more crucial point in our daily lives. One of the methods is to build a Zoomable User Interfaces (ZUIs) by using several zooming tools so that the amount of information, which needs to be handled by users, can be shown on a small screen unlimitedly. Smooth zooming technology helps users to interact with their sense of the focus-and-context by shifting the cognitive load to the human visual system, and it can provide a possible solution that satisfies the above demands by means of increasing the effectiveness for using the small screen. Thus supporting zooming tools on mobile devices is a necessary item with enabling users to effectively control the zooming methods. The goal of this paper is to increase the performance of user interfaces by developing zooming tools on mobile devices. Three zooming approaches will be introduced in this paper. First, focus zooming tools, which consists of the magnifying glass that was introduced from a “Bifocal Display” (Apperley, Tzavaras, and Spence, 1982), the gray scaling and blurring lens that was introduced from a “Focus+Context Visualization” (Giller, Tscheligim, Schrammel, Fröhlich, and Rabl, 2001), will be proposed. Second, file zooming tools including zoom-in and zoom-out functions to enlarge or reduce data and images based on the geometric zooming technology will be proposed. Finally, search zooming tools, which have two functions support a popup zooming and a shadow zooming functions to assist user easy to control for seeing many files on the device, will be introduced. Furthermore, the paper addresses a new usability testing method which combines heuristic, scenarios, and questionnaire approaches in order to effectively take experimental results from users. Its testing methods and procedures will be introduced by conducting usability test with user.