Zooming in on Legibility

Most Web sites aren't designed to be viewed on the small screen. But with a few clever zooming tricks, they can more legible on mobile devices.

Mobile device interface designers have a challenging job, and it's one that doesn't get any easier over time. Processors get faster, carriers offer more services, bandwidth increases, and it results in more content being delivered to the user. But the display size doesn't get any bigger. How do designers deal with increases in speed and information density, when they are stuck with the same little screen they had two or three years ago? And until retinal projectors arrive on the scene, they aren't going to be getting more screen real estate to work with in the near future, either.

The challenge can be summed up in the old saying, "you can't put ten pounds of stuff in a five-pound bag." One way to get around the problem is giving the user the ability to decide on which five pounds are the most important by using some clever zooming tricks. Patrick Baudisch, a human-computer interaction research scientist at the Visualization and Interaction Research Group at Microsoft Research has been working on two projects -- "summary thumbnails" and "collapse-to-zoom" that make it easier to read web pages on mobile devices.