Scrolling tickers are the worst UX pattern in digital signage
A ticker is a single line of text that slides across a screen, usually along the bottom, usually right to left, usually forever. Stock prices running around a trading floor, headlines under a news anchor, an RSS feed crawling along the bottom of a signage screen. It also goes by marquee, crawl, or news strip. In digital signage it’s the widget sitting in the bottom band of almost every template. It’s also the worst piece of UX in the whole medium, and I’d rip it out of every product that has one.
Most bad UX is bad on purpose. Someone is extracting something from you, and the bad experience is the price. The ticker has no agenda. It’s text you can’t read, moving at a speed you didn’t pick, placed over content it makes harder to follow, and nobody gains anything from it. The industry I work in sells it as a feature anyway.
I build digital signage software. Almost every product in this market ships a ticker widget, and I think every one of them should be deleted. What we’re reproducing is a workaround for a hardware limitation from 1867. Nobody has had that limitation for about a century, and the workaround is still on the price list.
It was never a design decision
The ticker starts in 1867, when Edward Calahan built a machine that took stock prices off a telegraph line and printed them onto a strip of paper well under an inch wide. It ticked as it printed, hence the name. Thomas Edison spent the next few years improving it, and the contract work he got from the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company paid for his first workshop in Newark in 1870.
Look at what the medium forced. The information was a stream: one price after another, arriving in order, over a wire. The output was a strip: one line of characters, no width to spare. A stream pushed through a strip can only ever come out as text moving past a fixed point. Nobody chose scrolling. Scrolling was the only shape the pipe allowed.
And people hated it enough to throw it out of windows. The ticker tape parade, which New York stumbled into in 1886 when Wall Street clerks threw spools of it out of their windows at the Statue of Liberty parade, is literally the city dumping the medium into the street. It’s the only time in history a ticker has made a crowd happy.
Then in November 1928 the New York Times lit up the zipper on One Times Square: 14,800 bulbs in a single band around the building, 5 feet tall, with Hoover beating Smith as the first headline. Still one row. The sign cost $80,000 in 1928 money, and that bought one band of bulbs around a building, not a wall of them. The constraint changed from paper width to bulb budget, and the scroll came along for the ride.
Every ticker since has copied the shape without inheriting the excuse.
Then screens got big and we kept the strip
Cable TV picked it up as soon as it had screens to fill. The Financial News Network, a cable channel, ran a stock ticker across the bottom of the picture from 1981, and CNBC inherited it when it bought the bankrupt network in 1991. By the late 1980s CNN Headline News was doing the same, stock prices by day and sports scores by night. ESPN, the sports channel, made the sports version permanent on its second channel in 1995 and called it the BottomLine.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Fox News put up a crawl at 10:49, CNN followed within 20 minutes, MSNBC by 2 p.m. It made sense that day. There was more news than any anchor could say out loud and the strip was a pressure valve. The day ended. The strip didn’t.
25 years later a cable news screen is a small video surrounded by text you can’t read while watching the video, and video you can’t watch while reading the text. This is the one ticker the whole world has made peace with, and it fails exactly the way the RSS feed on a signage screen does. The only difference is that you paid for the subscription.
The web did the same thing at the same moment. Netscape had <blink>. Microsoft shipped <marquee> in Internet Explorer 2.0 in late 1995, and within 6 months Jakob Nielsen had it on his list of the 10 worst mistakes in web design. The tag is still in every browser. Nobody defends it. It stays because enough ancient pages would break if it left. It has outlived the browser that created it, and it’ll outlive most of the people who typed it.
Then came the red dot-matrix LED strip. It’s in bus windows, pawn shops, phone repair stores, and the window of any store that wants to look electronic for under $100. It’s the cheapest sign that moves, and its whole personality is the scroll.
And then digital signage, my corner of the world, absorbed all of it. Open almost any signage CMS and there’s a ticker widget. The templates ship with a strip across the bottom, usually wired to an RSS feed, usually showing weather or headlines nobody standing in front of the screen asked for.
Ask a vendor why and you get the same answer every time: customers ask for it. I believe them. But customers aren’t signage experts, and nobody should expect them to be. They’ve seen a ticker on the news, on the bus, in a competitor’s showroom, so when they describe what they want, a ticker is in the picture. That’s a sketch of what they’ve seen around, and a sketch isn’t a requirement. Taking the sketch, building it, and calling it customer-driven is outsourcing your product judgment to the one person who hired you for it. A vendor who knows the medium hears “ticker”, asks what the customer is trying to tell people, and shows them a way that gets read.
And I’m not convinced the customers started it. My guess is that at some point a vendor put a scrolling strip in a demo because it made the screen look busy, a salesperson noticed that “and here’s your live news feed” got a nod in the room, and a feature was born. The next customer saw it in the demo and asked for it. A competitor saw the request and built one. 20 years later every vendor says the customers demanded it, and nobody can name the customer. I’ve written before about copying competitor features and this is the purest example I know: a feature that exists because it exists. If you’ve shipped one, this is about you.
Why your eyes hate it
Reading isn’t a smooth motion. Your eyes jump, land on a chunk of text for a fraction of a second, jump again. You skip words you can predict, you double back when something doesn’t parse, and you slow down for a number or a name. All of that depends on the text holding still.
A ticker takes every one of those moves away. You can’t skim ahead because ahead hasn’t arrived. You can’t re-read because it’s gone. You can’t skip the boring part because the boring part is in front of the part you want and it’s leaving at the same speed. Your eye has to track the text smoothly instead of jumping, which is a thing eyes are built to do for a bird in flight, not for a sentence about opening hours.
It’s the only text format where the reader controls nothing. Someone else picked the pace, the position, the order, and the moment it starts. Imagine this post delivered that way, one line at a time at a speed I picked for you, with the paragraph you wanted to re-read already scrolled off. You’d close the tab. And yet we put exactly that format in airports, bank lines, and hospital waiting rooms, where people are already stressed and already waiting on something they can’t control.
It also damages whatever sits next to it. Your eyes are wired to catch movement at the edge of your vision, because for most of history the thing moving at the edge of your vision was about to eat you. You can’t switch that off. So a strip that never stops moving at the bottom of a screen keeps tugging your eyes away from whatever you were trying to look at, and it does that even when you’ve decided to ignore it. Especially then. That’s the annoyance people can’t quite name when they say a ticker is distracting. A series of experiments at Kansas State, published in 2005, showed young viewers short CNN Headline News stories either with the full graphics package or in a visually simple version without the crawl and the other overlays. The cluttered version cost them about 10 percent of the facts from the main story. The clutter didn’t add information to the broadcast. It subtracted from it. Every scrolling line at the bottom of a screen is a tax on the content above it.
Accessibility guidelines noticed years ago. WCAG says anything that moves on its own for more than 5 seconds, alongside other content, needs a way to pause, stop, or hide it. A ticker on a public screen has no pause button. By the letter of the rules every one of them fails, and nobody checks, because nobody thinks of a sign as an interface.
Why it won’t die
The ticker survives because it solves a problem for the person who bought the screen, and that person never stands under it.
The problem is having to decide what matters. Static text has to be short. Someone has to pick the 3 things that fit on the screen, which means admitting the other 20 don’t. A ticker fits infinitely many things, one after another, so nobody has to choose, and the hours and the promotion and the weather all get their turn. It’s a content decision nobody made, shipped as a feature.
What to do instead
If the text changes, cut between states instead of dragging them past. Show a line. Hold it. 3 seconds is plenty for a sentence that takes 1 to read. Then replace it with the next one. Your eye gets to jump the way it wants, and anyone who glances up gets a whole thought instead of half of one.
If there’s more text than fits on one screen at once, there’s too much text. People push back on that every single time, and every single time they’re wrong.
If it’s genuinely live data, flight times or prices or wait numbers, it’s a table that updates in place. A row changes color when it changes. Nothing moves except the thing that changed, which is exactly what you want the eye drawn to.
The one honest ticker left is the decorative one. The exchange floor with a band of prices running around the room, the newsroom with the strip in the background of the shot. Nobody is reading those. They’re there to make a room feel like information is flowing through it, and they do that job well. That’s set dressing, and set dressing is allowed. The moment you put the opening hours on it, it’s a sign again, and it’s a bad one.
The zipper on One Times Square went dark in the early 1960s, flickered on and off under a string of tenants, was ripped out in 2019, and has just been rebuilt in LEDs as a tourist attraction. That tells you what it’s for. Calahan’s machine ticked because something was constraining it, and the tick was the sound of that constraint. We kept the tick for nearly 160 years and forgot it was ever a limitation at all.
Delete the widget.
If you’d rather not, the whole post is scrolling along the bottom of your screen right now. Let me know when you finish it.