Abstract

Users increasingly expect access to data from a wide range of devices, both wired and wireless. The long term goal of our research is to inform the design of applications that support data access by providing reasonably seamless migration of data among internet-compatible devices with minimal loss of effectiveness and efficiency. In this paper we focus on design issues related to the use of tables of data on small mobile devices. In particular we are concerned with tables presented in an overview or focus + context style to maintain the consistency of their structure on all devices to support users who have already used the data on larger devices. We report on the results of two user studies related to two techniques, cascade and auto column expansion, that support the use of tables in such a display. We show that for a range of tasks from simple lookup to complex comparisons, both techniques provide benefit to the users.

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