Mobile Portal Personalization: Tools and Techniques

Barry Smyth, Kevin McCarthy, James Reilly

Abstract: The usability of mobile portals has been a major stumbling block since the advent of the mobile Internet and WAP handsets. Indeed poor usability is cited as a major contributing factor to the poor take-up of mobile Internet services amongst consumers. A key problem relates to the amount of time that users spend navigating to content as they browse mobile portals. Recent advances in personalization technology have the potential to solve this problem, and today a number of leading operators already provide their users with access to intelligent portals that are automatically personalized based on subscriber usage patterns. In this chapter, we examine this so-called personalized navigation technology and describe how it has been used to significantly enhance the usability of leading mobile portals. In addition we consider ways in which this approach to personalization may be enhanced by combining structural properties of a mobile portal (such as the distance to content sites) with the access probabilities of users. We demonstrate that although such distance factors have proven successful in Web personalization, they are less beneficial when it comes to the personalization of mobile portals.