Do dynamic text-only web pages improve usability for PDA users?

Text transcoders are proxy–like systems that respond to requests sent by user’s browsers, strip images, multimedia objects, JavaScript code and change the page layout. Al- though the potential benefits of text transcoders as mecha- nisms to provide alternative and robust user interfaces are multifaceted, at the moment their benefits on users of small mobile devices are not clear. This paper describes an experiment aimed at evaluating us- ability of web pages used with PDAs when processed by a text transcoder. Results based on subjective and objective data show that effectiveness, productivity and satisfaction can be improved. Furthermore, the needed transformations are simple to implement, and mostly achievable by many text transcoders.