[Sigia-l] Usability of scrolling news headlines?

[Hanan Cohen]

Shalom and thanks everybody for the thoughtful replies.

I will try to sum them up like this:

If the business of your site is "news", people will look for news, see
them and use them.

If the business of your site is not "news", find other ways to tell them
about "what's new".

And it can even be said shorter: 

"News" and "What's new" are not the same.

Thanks again,

Hanan Cohen


----- Original message -----
From: "Jared M. Spool" <jspool at uie.com>
To: "Hanan Cohen" <hanan at info.org.il>
Cc: sigia-l at asis.org
Date: Wed, 22 Nov 2006 15:53:15 -0500
Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] Usability of scrolling news headlines?

On Nov 22, 2006, at 1:52 AM, Hanan Cohen wrote:

> I am looking for hard (measured, tested) information on the user
> experience of rolling headlines that many websites have.

All the evidence suggests users come to a web site with a mission. If  
the content in the "rolling headlines" does not relate to their  
mission, it's virtually impossible to get them to see it. Short of  
having a screen that presents the information and prevents them from  
starting their mission until they acknowledge it, you probably won't  
get users to interact with the content that doesn't support their  
mission.

If you have pressing news and users aren't specifically going to come  
to the site to see that news, you're probably better off using a  
"push" technology, such as email to make them aware of it.

Hope that helps,

Jared

Jared M. Spool
User Interface Engineering
510 Turnpike St., Suite 102, North Andover, MA 01845
e: jspool at uie.com p: +1 978 327 5561
http://uie.com  Blog: http://uie.com/brainsparks