How Much On-Screen Ticker Clutter Is Too Much?

Canberra.
The next presenter an ANZCA 2010 is Jennifer Robinson, whose interest is in interfaces to journalistic content. An interesting case study for this is the cable finance news channel Bloomberg TV, which presents its viewers with multiple concurrent information streams - apparently contradicting the view that there are natural limits to how much information the human brain can process at any one time.

There are different forms of viewing television, for example: staring (over 15 seconds, and not taking in much information); engaged looks (5-15 seconds); orienting (1.5-5 seconds); and monitoring (less than 1.5 seconds). Features that impact on information processing on the screen are clutter (and perceived clutter), intrusiveness of content (e.g. pop-up ads), and the content itself (edits, cuts, sounds, etc.).

So, it should be assumed that cluttered content as it is available on channels like Bloomberg TV should affect the viewing experience. The project tested the responses to various types of screen clutter of some 266 people, in a lab situation: variously showing them screens no tickers, one ticker, two tickers, and four tickers (where tickers can mean both scrolling updates or static but quickly changing text) - four tickers would mean two line tickers at the bottom of the screen as well as two ticker boxes as a combined sidebar on the right. People were tested for their recall of news and ticker content, attitudes towards the ticker content, ad brand knowledge and exposure, and even biometric responses (eye gaze, skin conductance - which measures excitement -, and heart rate).

Adverse effects were found mainly for high levels of clutter - on brand recognition, brand recall, ticker content recognition, and the like or dislike of programmes. So, four tickers seem to be too many. Overall, though, viewers seemed to spend very little time on viewing the tickers (most for the four ticker version, perhaps unsurprisingly) - and there was substantially better recall for non-scrolling tickers (where one message replaces another wholesale rather than laboriously scrolling from one end of the screen to the other). Not surprisingly, already visual-heavy programme information is especially impacted upon by clutter.

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