mCatalogue : An adaptive catalogue for mCommence

Abstract

The possibility of using mobile devices conveniently for web browsing and online transactions is a long overdue promise made by developers of wireless technology. Despite continual improvement in bandwidth and capabilities of mobile devices, these hardware upgrades have not brought about the wireless revolution that has been widely anticipated. This disappointment has generally been attributed to a lack of content as well as usability issues. With reference to the latter, this thesis presents a novel model for catalogue navigation as a solution to improve user experience when using devices with small screen size for browsing. Through a bookmark system coupled with preference inference mechanism, an adaptive catalogue has been created that dynamically guides a user towards items that are of interest to the user. The approach emphasizes a minimum attention user interface that allows user to browse through a catalogue quickly with minimal cognitive effort. The performance of the technique has been evaluated and the results proved to be promising.