Adapting user interface of service-oriented rich client to mobile phones

Abstract

For better user experience, more and more primitive or composite web services are presented to end users as rich clients in web browsers. However, such service-oriented rich clients cannot work well on a mobile phone mainly because of its small screen size. And then a simplified user interface for mobile phones has to be developed by the service providers, which brings extra development cost and usually decreases user experience. In this paper, we propose an approach to automatically adapting the user interface of service-oriented rich client to mobile phones. Compared to the traditional static web pages, those of rich clients are generated dynamically and changed due to user actions. Our approach analyzes the DOM tree, splits it into a set of sub tree, each of which is suitable for the target screen size, and generates the dynamic navigation interface among those sub trees. 20 most popular rich clients are evaluated, in which 60% are well adapted, 25% are acceptable and 15% are failed because their user interfaces are too large for the small screen and even the experts cannot adapt them well by hand.