Multimodal Menu Interface for Mobile Web Browsing

A bstr act: T his paper presents a menu-based interface intended to support web navigation through multimodal interaction on small displays. As common starting points for web browsing and searching, portals organize links to news, entertainment, and other kinds of content. T he problem is that portal navigation is tailored mainly to large displays and point-and-click interaction, but most mobile devices, such as cellphones, have small displays. Moreover, mobile devices provide only a limited means for interaction, such as keypad entry. T he question is how to provide convenient portal access for mobile users. Our approach to facilitating portal navigation on small mobile devices relies on transcoding middleware, software running in the network that adapts markup and content to device capabilities. Our middleware tailors portal markup to present visual hierarchical menus, enable keypad-based and spoken input, and allow for spoken audio output. R esults from a user study that compared our multimodal menu-based interface with standard portal interfaces on small displays indicate that our interface (1) requires fewer button presses to find information, and (2) is subjectively preferred by users.