Comparison test of website use with mobile phone and laptop computer

Abstract

The study compared user performance and subjective ratings between a mobile phone and laptop computer for accessing the internet. Twenty four participants were required to carry out two equivalent sets of 5 tasks, one set of tasks with a mobile phone and the other set with a laptop. It was found that the task times for the mobile phone were higher than those of the laptop for all tasks but only significantly different for two of the task pairs. The most important reason for this result seemed to be the difference in size of the screens on each device. Participants were also asked to rate the difficulty of each task performed on both laptop and phone. Interestingly, participants did not rate the difficulty of using the mobile phone significantly higher than for the laptop. This seemed to be because of lower expectations when using the mobile phone, good dexterity in zooming in and out of the screen, and spending less time reviewing each page on the phone than on the laptop before moving on another page. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.