Samantha Ingram
A 20+ year veteran of the UX Industry,
directing righteous indignation at everyday usability violations.
Digital billboards were meant to modernize roadside advertising — dynamic, eye-catching, efficient. But on a highway where every second counts, this attention-economy sideshow becomes a safety hazard. We’ve turned critical glanceability into animated spectacle, where the user is doing 75 mph and the interface updates every six seconds.
UX Violations
Violation: Recognition Rather Than Recall
Drivers rely on static signs as navigational anchors. Frequent animations take cognitive resources away from navigation and safety.
Violation: Aesthetic and Minimalist Design
Flashing lights, jittery animations, and maximalist typography turn these displays into visual spam — in a context where clarity saves lives.
Where the road requires minimalist design (clear signage, clean sightlines, zero ambiguity), billboards introduce excessive motion, over-saturated colors, and fast frame changes. Visual noise competes with the essential system of wayfinding and hazard detection.
Violation: Help Users Recognize, Diagnose, and Recover from Errors
No error recovery at 65 miles per hour
When a digital billboard captures a driver’s attention at the wrong moment, it can cause missed exits, late braking, or hazardous lane changes. Unlike in a digital interface, there’s no undo button, no error message explaining what went wrong — only physical consequences. The lack of recovery pathways turns a minor distraction into a major system failure.
How to Fix
Limit Animation Frequency
Restrict how often content changes on billboards, especially near intersections, exits, or turns. Progressive disclosure principles apply — motion should be reserved for when it's necessary, not constant.
Implement Glanceability Standards
Design billboard content so that if glanced at for less than a second, it doesn’t overwhelm or confuse. High-contrast, low-density messaging reduces cognitive strain and respects task flow: the primary task is driving, not decoding advertisements.
Geo-Fence Sensitive Areas
Ban or heavily restrict dynamic billboards within a radius of complex driving environments — merges, pedestrian crossings, school zones. Feedback loops should reward safe placements, not just high-visibility ones.
Change Management
Making Digital Billboards Safer by Design
Set Clear Zoning Regulations
Protect high-cognitive-load areas from disruption
Track legibility and cognitive load at speed. Work with municipalities to define UX standards for dwell time, contrast, and glance readability.
Regulate for Context, Not Just Content
Adapt interface behavior based on driving conditions
Push for regional policies that treat digital billboards as interactive public interfaces. Require adaptive content throttling during inclement weather, high-traffic zones, or night driving. Just because it can display a 3-second perfume ad doesn’t mean it should.
Conduct Real-World Usability Testing
Audit from the driver’s seat
Skip the agency mockups. Use actual road simulations to measure glance duration, peripheral retention, and safe readability.
Redesign the Platform Guidelines
Less Vegas, more signage
Require advertisers to design within constraints tailored to motion-based viewing: limit font weights, prevent excessive motion, and adhere to pre-approved color and contrast ratios. If we treat these as interfaces, we can enforce design systems.
