“Analysis of Web Content Delivered to a Mobile Computing Environment”

by Anthony Perreault | Xchanges 6.1

IMDb.com

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) is an online repository for just about everything movie-related: movie reviews, synopsis, actors/actresses, directors and producers, even movie trailers and still images. Everything a movie buff can ask for—except mobile usability. Design elements can be made out in portrait orientation, but just what they are is hard to tell. A navigation bar can be seen across the top of the page, and what appears to be secondary navigation down the left hand side of the screen. The links are hard to read and select. There is other content down the right hand side of the page, perhaps an ad of some sort (lower right).

In landscape orientation the site fares a little better. I can now discern that the navigation bar has elements—what they are, I don’t know without further magnification. I can also easily see and read the top most links, which are links to trailers for several upcoming movies. The green diamond to the right of the links indicates a site element that is unsupported by the mobile Safari browser, probably Flash content of some kind.