Clever move to make the slide transition timeout juuust a tad too fast to read, further driving home the point that carousels are a shit way to present information.
Here's my counter argument to that site. Big eCommerce sites will test and optimize every pixel and if something doesn't work, they'll replace it with something better. Now, go find a list of the top ten eCommerce sites and I'll bet at least 50% have a carousel on the home page.<p>Google's first search result gave me Amazon, eBay, Walmart Target, Etsy, Best Buy, Macys, The Home Depot,Wish and Craigslist. Only four don't have a carousel: Target,Etsy, Macys and Craigslist.<p>Lot's of cherry picking. The 1% nd.edu stat ignores the 8% clicks a similar carousel was getting on a different ND web property. For giggles, here's the home page at the time :
<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20121214022552/www.nd.edu/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20121214022552/www.nd.edu/</a><p>- The Neilson Norman Group sample size was ONE.<p>- If you read the all of the Weilder Fuller comment, he says "Now, I’ll preface the remarks below by saying that there are some excellent uses for a rotating gallery. "<p>- <a href="https://www.accessibilityoz.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.accessibilityoz.com/</a> - accessibility specialists have a carousel on their home page.<p>The Adam Fellows quote isn't from the page that's linked. It's from <a href="https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/10312/are-carousels-effective" rel="nofollow">https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/10312/are-carousels-e...</a> where he also says "“Of course in some situations a carousel is exactly the right means to deliver content and so we need to try and importantly test every situation.”
Yes, but carousels are rarely added because they provide a good UX. They are added because motion draws attention and attention sells. Let's say you have 3 big sales going on on your site: do you put them next to each other so visitors can see all three right away? If so, congratulations, you are a moral person.
But marketing people aren't (/s) and they know that if the visitor sees the word SALE just as it slides away in the carousel, they'll want to know more. But now they're already staring at the next slide, so they read that one, then the next, then they're finally back at the first one. Even if they don't go through the whole thing and just click back to see the first one, they have now spent far more time looking at your ad than if they were only idly scanning the site.<p>AliExpress is notorious for this, with even the "you might also like" items on a deliberately too fast slider, so something can catch your eye, but then you already have to interact with it to get it back before you've even had the chance to think about it. And once you get someone to interact with your ad, the chances of them clicking it and possibly buying it go up by a lot.
Carousels are the type of UI pattern that is only okay if you <i>ask</i> for it. Amazon is a good example of a carousel done right. If I want to see the full-sized images which are part of a customer's product review, I click on the thumbnail representing these images, with the expectation that some larger, more obvious version of the images will be made available. Once a carousel appears in an overlay, it's not disturbing or annoying at all. It's there because I asked for it.
I work at a design agency. Most of my coworkers have seen this site before, and generally agree with it. But we still propose designs with carousels to clients.<p>A lot of our clients are obsessed with what content is "above the fold". Never mind that "that fold" doesn't really exist on the web given different screen sizes, and never mind that users are more likely to scroll down than click slides. Every executive simply must have their all-important tidbit at the top of the page.<p>A carousel is a way to solve this perceived problem. As long as no one actually needs to see the content anyway, they at least aren't actively detrimental to the overall user experience.
I've often found Carousels do a good job when there is repetitive information,<p>E.g. testimonials - you got one big testimonials but you also have a dozen more and you don't want to fill up your page with just that.. so you use a carousel.
I had a client that said they wanted one because it made them look like they did all kinds of stuff. They didn’t care if it was used. It was all an illusion.<p>It needed to portray:<p>“We are big enough for you to consider doing business with us and to buy our services”
Facebook and Instagram use carousels for their Stories feature. Google uses carousels for News stories and product results. Are they the exception and if so, why? Or are they not aware of the user data?
Another design issue that I see are landing pages for sites that don't need landing pages. My university's course selection site has a landing page with...yep a carousel. Why? None of the information on said landing page is useful. I want to see my schedule and courses. That's it.
A few cherry-picked quotes doesn't really tell me anything, since the value of a carousel depends on a number of factors:<p>- how is the carousel being used? To display similar products, to show latest blog posts?<p>- are your users primarily on desktop or mobile?<p>- have you A/B tested carousels to see if users interact with them more, less or the same?<p>I see carousels on sites like Ikea and Best Buy and IMO it's a useful way to get a quick glimpse of what categories of products are currently on sale.
It's the classic <i>false economy</i> you're saving vertical space, but nobody wants to scroll your carousels, or wait for it to transition. It's always easier to just scroll down the page, especially on mobile.<p>Apps like Instagram have a standard carousel for photo albums and people use them and can trust the functionality.<p>But most websites have varying implementations of carousels, with weird functionality (autoplay, transitions, no-swipe, randomized). Users get confused by each implementation and eventually just ignore them...
Carousels are good for things users should be vaguely aware of but are not likely to click on. For example if you have a company that sells a widget, you can have the important menu about buying a widget on the top and below it a carousel of recent news with pictures.<p>These news can be about your participation in widget related conferences, about you passing obtaining environmental goals, about some R&D project promising some better widget some time in the future, about community involvement of your company etc.<p>Most customers will not click on those stories and they are not intended to. But they will get a changing site with changing pictures and will peripherally learn that you are a forward thinking socially involved company that is an R&D leader, participates in the community, etc.
A moment to call out the laggy, janky carousel on Zillow mobile interface. Ugh. Opening images to scrolly mode is smoother but that left/right flick on their carousel is even bumpy on Pixel/Chrome
I expected this to be a flow chart like this:<p><a href="http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/index.php?date=020605" rel="nofollow">http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/index.php?date=020605</a>
worked great for me... with javascript turned off. just scrolled down the page and read all the content at my leisure.<p>the only glitch was the sticky footer that fixed itself in the middle of the page instead of at the bottom of the viewport.<p>so my takeaway is, use good markup for carousels, in case users have js turned off, and sticky footers should use css (position: sticky), not js on top of position: absolute.<p>(like others, i think image carousels with galleries are fine)
> “Carousels are effective at being able to tell people in Marketing/Senior Management that their latest idea is on the Home Page. Use them to put content that users will ignore on your Home Page. Or, if you prefer, don’t use them. Ever.”
>
> lee duddell<p>This tells me I should absolutely use carousels. Just don't expect people to read the text in there.
And yet: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190913224546/https:/twitter.com/garybernhardt/status/1172610099136716800" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20190913224546/https:/twitter.co...</a><p>(I'm unsure why Gary removed these tweets, maybe something did change his mind on this.)
I've always hated carousels with a passion. Even if they provide some sort of valuable information, by the time your attention is focused on it, it usually jumps to the next "slide" or whatever they are called. So yes, you should not. And I really don't understand why so many people are obsessed with them.
At least if you’re going to (or forced to) at least use a good well tested library. I’ve written more than I want to count myself over the years and they’re just such a pain to get right.<p><a href="https://swiperjs.com/" rel="nofollow">https://swiperjs.com/</a> Is probably one of the best out there.
Any UI, accessibility, or common sense reasons are irrelevant.<p>It's the UX, managers, marketing people asking for more clicks, ad impressions, user engagement... and you will make a carousel for them each time they'll request.
We need one for excessive padding. STOP please. Have a completely separate style sheet for mobile devices where you can use padding for larger touch areas.<p>Use tables to organize information. Make it dense.<p>When you think you stick 24px padding and it “looks” right to you? Now cut that by 75% to just 6px.
I'd argue this is different on mobile compared to the web.<p>It's pretty common in mobile onboarding flows to use a carousel like UI. It's much easier to swipe on a carousel-like UI and it's enough of a common design pattern there that people are used to it.
Would love to know these stats adjusted for age. I would expect anyone younger than 35 to know how to interact with a carousel. And some content like a resort's home page with a gallery of images / things to do isn't bad for a carousel. CMV