Source:
"Browsing Large HTML Tables on Small Screens." by Keishi Tajima and Kaori Ohnishi. UIST 2008
"Browsing Large HTML Tables on Small Screens." by Keishi Tajima and Kaori Ohnishi. UIST 2008
Figure 1: Normal Mode w/ collapsible headers
Figure 2: Record Mode
Figure 3: Cell Mode
In the paper "Browsing Large HTML Tables on Small Screens" by Keishi Tajima and Kaori Ohnishi. Their goal is to try to solve the problems of viewing large tables of data on a PDA or a cellphone. First, they start off by narrowing down the types of tables that people would normally go on while they're using a portable device. Next, they went into a discussion of how to interpret the data in the table, such as using the relational approach or the matrix approach. Then, they talked about the different modes that they try to implement. Normal mode is well, normal. They allow the user to fold unnecessary columns or rows to view only the ones they want. Also, they can show a balloon with the headers of the rows and columns so the user can know what the data represents. If the user clicks on a row (column) header, then the table will show the cell contents and its corresponding column (row) header. In cell mode, it will show the same thing, but it would include the header that you clicked on at the top, and this time, the user will always see that header. The style of folding has a problem because it needs to know which row and column are headers. Composite cells can be a problem if they represent an aggregate of two categories. They devised many rules to determine whether logical substructures and whether the cell is part of the header. They did experiements on whether or not their rules would work. They used a group of 80 tables, and it didn't work for all of them, showing that more work needs to be done. Some rules caused more errors than others.
I believe that this is important for portable devices. It would be more convenient for the people to be able to access data on the run. While it is possible to shrink the table down so you can see it, reading it would be difficult. The normal and cell modes were use to use and understand. Of course, finding out the headers is the difficult part and would need more work in the future. If I had more knowledge of databases, since they use some database terminology in the paper, I might have been able to understand this paper more and come up with better ideas on how to solve some issues.
Yes, I have problems looking at tables on my iPod touch. I can easily zoom in on the table, but that makes it incredibly hard to read.
ReplyDeleteI think this research is worthwhile and should be perfected. I believe many people would be happy with better table-viewing methods on mobile devices.
I have a PDA myself and the size of the screen does not lend itself to displaying large tables very easily. I know a lot of businesses would benefit greatly from this research. At the moment, I do not have to view large tables on my PDA, but when the time comes that I do, I hope this research has become widely usable.
ReplyDeleteAs the web gets more mature, these types of large tables seem to happen less often, but that doesn't mean the internet doesn't have millions of them wandering around. If you are on a mobile device and you need to few one these tables, the approaches outlines here are good idea. No one likes scrolling for information.
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