Powerpoint twitter ticker bar6/17/2023 ![]() ![]() You need to ask the user what they want the information for and why, then try and solve that problem. I'd guess that perhaps it's been requested because the user wants a quick summary of what's going on - in that case, what's the best way of displaying that for a user who can scroll down? Perhaps a list, or a table, or. A ticker has most likely been suggested because that's a solution to the problem that the person requesting it has seen before. I think it's a case of working out what problem is the ticker trying to solve, then solving that problem. So it's really just a question of - is this dashboard showing information slowly/sequentially in a limited/defined space? If that is the case then it might be the right solution, and it can work well in those situations. ![]() The latter of these two - the voice of the presenter - isn't generally there on a dashboard (or any website). It also has the advantage that, because it's (usually) with the sound on, you can read the ticker and listen to the presenter at the same time. It's good because you can read a summary of the news quickly, as the TV presenter is going through a news story in detail. Personal opinion: Tickers are good, as stated above, when the amount of space you have is defined (eg the ticker on a TV news channel). If you can not be sure that someone visiting a page will read a ticker (in its entirety or even at all) for these varying reasons, you can not place significant information in the ticker, so why would you even have a ticker? In effect, using a ticker is not going to impart information as well as static text. Most people are too impatient to wait for something to scroll: either they will assume any non-visible information is unimportant, or they will be frustrated at waiting for it to scroll to being visible. A ticker that moves as fast as many people can scan a page would be illegible, because tickers actually work against the natural process by which our eyes scan and interpret text via saccades. If the information takes up more space than the horizontal width of the ticker, it will only ever display a limited portion of that information at any given time. But the movement makes it harder to read, and is an annoying, distracting element while trying to focus on other content on the page. If the information fits within the horizontal space of the ticker, then the only reason for it to move is… to try to draw the eye. Presumably, it was (a) to present information and (b) to call attention to that information. Other than as an attempt to use a ticker as needless anachronistic skeuomorph for visual effect (I can't even say "appeal" here), what purpose does the ticker serve? What was the intended purpose in placing it in the page? Even while the ticker's motion may be eye catching and force focus on itself, it can be psychologically distancing and create a feeling of annoyance at the attempted capture, particularly if the information first read does not seem to be of high enough importance to necessitate drawing attention to it in every way possible.įinally, Tickers are a poorer presentation of information than static text, and may even break on mobileĬonsider answer. Tickers force whoever is viewing them into a passive audience state, which can be very disengaging and immediately reduce the interest of the viewer in the content being presented. Someone who is trying to read content that is presented as a static list can scroll up or down at their own leisure, and are actively engaged in that act. There are very good reasons why tickers are not used on the vast majority of websites today!Īs a corollary to both and Obee's very nice answers, there is an additional consideration: Tickers remove control from the person viewing the information In the case of a ticker, the content is usually supposed to be peripheral to the main content on a page, but the animation causes it to be distracting to the main content.įinally, the empirics support your point of view. Moving elements on a page will automatically grab user attention. Having those words move makes for a difficult reading experience (users spend disproportionate effort reading the moving letters, which reduces capacity for understanding the content). It's well studied that people don't read smoothly, but rather read words in chunks. On the other hand, if the scroll speed is increased, then users not focused on the ticker will find it difficult to focus on the content because it's moving too quickly. If a reader is focused on reading the ticker, she will read it faster than it scrolls, which makes for a frustrating experience. Users don't know how large the content is, what order it appears in, where it starts or ends, and how long it will take to read all of it. Since you're asking for disadvantages, tickers are an antipattern because:
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