Usability study on newspaper mobile websites

The purpose of this study is to analyze the mobile websites of newspapers in terms of their user interface, particularly for the space usage for content.

Since the early age of the web in the mid‐1990s, many usability recommendations have made for desirable web page design to maximize the valuable but limited space of a screen. To verify whether those recommendations have been applied appropriately to the recent development of mobile web pages, the first pages of 775 online news mobile sites were captured and analyzed in terms of the relationship between the words of the content and various design aspects of the sites. The dependent variable is the number of content words displayed on the first page and the independent variables are the different aspects of the mobile web pages' interface design.

Multiple practices of wasting space were identified such as too large advertisement areas and navigation only first pages. Suggestions to save the space are made, including automatic URL box hiding. Discussions are carried for various issues such as links to desktop versions and search boxes.

This research is unique in that a large number of mobile news sites were analyzed for their usability and its findings and discussions provide mobile web developers useful information for better mobile web design.