Evaluating the Effectiveness of "Effective View Navigation" for Very Long Ordered Lists on Mobile Devices

Searching for an item in a long ordered list is a frequent task when using any kind of computing device (from desktop PCs to mobile phones). This paper explores three different interfaces to support this task on the limited screen of mobile devices (e.g., PDAs, in-car systems, mobile phones). Two of the considered interfaces are based on the idea of tree-augmentation of a list proposed in Furnas’ Effective View Navigation theory [6] and differ in their depth versus breadth ratio. The third interface adopts the traditional technique of list scrolling based on keyboard entry. We compare them in terms of search time, number of errors, and user’s satisfaction. Results show that list scrolling based on keyboard entry outperforms both tree-augmented lists and that the broader tree-augmented list is better than the deeper one.