Design Metrics and the Adaptation of Web-page content Chunks for PDAs

The majority of web-pages are unsuitable for viewing on PDAs, WAP phones and similar devices without first being adapted. However, little empirical work has been done on what actually constitutes a good PDA or WAP web-page. This paper ranks a number of PDA web-pages from different categories empirically and correlates the result against the design metrics present. The findings are then compared against a similar set of experiments for PC web-pages. The results of this comparison suggest that, as well as omitting, summarizing and converting individual multimedia objects in the web-page to a less resource intensive form, the design metrics need to be changed during adaptation to enhance the presentation of web-content on non-PC devices. The paper concludes by investigating the effect of applying some suitable changes to the design metrics on web=page content chunks, which form the basic units in automatic content adaptation systems.