• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.33-42
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• 2015

As smart phones have been increasingly used to access information with bigger screens and higher resolution, smart phones have rapidly grown larger. Even Apple which had stuck to the 4-inch smart phone screen size, released 5.5-inch iPhone 6 plus. In this trend of smart phone enlargement, manufacturers have mostly incorporated one-handed modes to 5-inch or larger phones to keep the convenience of one-handed operation. But most of them provide just smaller screens and are rather complicated to set up after several menus to touch. In this study, this research examined one-handed functions of each smart phone manufacturer to understand problems in the one-handed smart-phone manipulation of web-browsing which is one of the frequent smart phone services. And by investigating smart phone users, this research found out requirements for one-handed web search operation. Based on this examination, the author of this research designed an efficient one-handed interface for mobile web-search without reducing the screen size. Then, to assess the possible usability improvement, the prototype was applied to a large 5.5-inch-screen smart phone to evaluate its performance through observation and surveys and find out manipulation satisfaction and further improvements.