I work at an ad agency and we have to send this link to people on a regular basis.
We actually had a customer once who put 40 (!) carousel slides on the frontpage of his website and wondered why nobody is clicking through to the linked pages.
When someone insists on carousels now, I tell them that it will also hurt website performance and therefore its ranking on Google. This shuts them up 99% percent of the time.
The author is sarcastic, but "being able to tell people in Marketing/Senior Management that their latest idea is on the Home Page" without interfering with the homepage is a significant business need.
Here is something else to avoid in web (or mobile) apps: Chain of tips [1].<p>This is when the app forces you to click on one tip after another before you are allowed to use the app.<p>It just frustrates the user who just wants to get to the button that does the job. He doesn't want to pay attention to your tips. If your app is hard to figure out without those tips, redesign it.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.nngroup.com/articles/mobile-instructional-overlay/#:~:text=Avoid%20Chains%20of%20Tips" rel="nofollow">https://www.nngroup.com/articles/mobile-instructional-overla...</a>
I do think carousels have an important place in design: collapsing repetitive but possibly relevant content.<p>Example:<p>You are a contractor who makes their living off of their reputation. You have a set of testimonials (maybe 5-8).<p>A user visiting your website may be browsing for several reasons - and may or may not be interested in what others have to say about you. Collapsing all of the testimonials down into a single carousel shows you have testimonials and allows the user to browse through them if they’d like without forcing them to scroll through each one.<p>This content is repetitive - if you’ve seen one that conveys enough information - but each one potentially provides incremental reassurance for a user if they need that.
Like all things, I think they can have a purpose. They are pretty good when the content is primarily image based and when the purpose of the content is for design/feel. However, automatically rotating is often questionable unless it rotates extremely slowly and the content is particularly unimportant.
Bonus annoyance points if the carousel rotates automatically and carousel is not scrollable with keyboard. It's frustrating not having enough time to finish reading the carousel slide.
Don’t put text into a carousel. I think it makes sense for images. For example on a hotel page, show the people a few big pictures, even if they don‘t interact with the page.
I've tried pitching this, but my experience is that if a client wants a carousel, just give them what they want. If competitor X has a carousel, or big tech company Y has one, they're going to want a carousel, too. It helps to have analytic data from pre- and post-carousel, though.
Can't stand all the websites with "galleries" when searching for lists of things, trying to maximize ad impressions. I click away faster than anything.
All of the problems they point out are when using a carousel for navigation or other interactivity. A lot of times they are simply for displaying something flashy and dynamic on the front page without really caring whether a user sees it all or not, and for that they work great.
I actually don't hate carousels and I am part of the 1% that click them.<p>The stats don't lie.. but what is a better way to present information?
There are absolutely cases where carousels are useful — like for showing lists of secondary content that users want to explore.<p>They’re not so good for text heavy or ‘critical’ content that you want people to definitely read.<p>It helps if the content is visual and users can see the next slide peeking through, it hints that there’s more to see. Autoplay is always bad imo
As a IA / UI guy, I have to say I’ve come around a bit on this. I used to share the opinion, but mobile has changed my view. A well implemented touch enabled, smooth sliding horizontal carousel is an excellent UI component on a handheld device. I say that as a <i>user</i>.
There ought to be a browser/os settings to disable unprovoked animations and transitions. All information should be readily viewable, and controls shouldn't be moving around
unless you are the one to be moving them, looking at you android notifications..
Carousels with a native scroll bar are not that bad and they work without JS and can be acessible. They are a way to put a large number of items in a small section. Galleries with infinite scrolling can provide a better experience but I'm tired of pages where I can't scroll to the footer because the page keeps loading content as I scroll.
As an alternative and as long as it's not for main content, I'm okay with horizontal scrolling sections where you can partially see the next item as a hint that it's scrollable e.g. the iOS and Android store pages use this for screenshots.<p>You can code this with basic CSS too unlike most carousel behaviours that have complex code for simulating scrolling and looping. If you check the open/closed GitHub issues on most carousel plugins, you'll see what a big source of bugs they are.<p><a href="https://www.nngroup.com/articles/horizontal-scrolling/" rel="nofollow">https://www.nngroup.com/articles/horizontal-scrolling/</a> (2014) says to avoid horizontal scrolling on desktop but is there anything more recent and with metrics?
While I agree it's more likely that carousels are more of a way to satisfy stakeholders than to actually provide something of value to users, most of the usability issues with them are solved by simply disabling auto-play, or at least disable auto-play as soon as the user interacts with the carousel in any way.
I've had to build too many carousels over my career working for a major publisher. No matter how good our architecture was, no matter how good our css was and no matter how good our JS optimization was, they all sucked. Carousels need to go the way of blinking scrolling text.<p>Not all carousels are horrendous, but they are all bad. Even worse, all use cases have a significantly better, simpler solution.
The sources here on the topic of web design for UX sent me in a rabbit hole I doubt I'll get to leave today. So much great info.<p>Thanks for the share.
Strange just reading this I connected my two favourite film clips:<p>Mad Men, Carousel pitch:
<a href="https://youtu.be/suRDUFpsHus" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/suRDUFpsHus</a><p>And the Carousel scene from Logan’s Run:
<a href="https://youtu.be/viWT4JWWfTg" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/viWT4JWWfTg</a><p>Forty is the new thirty…
Aside from that, it's interesting how users expect everything in the frontpage now (Not that i m complaining). They seem to be blind to subpages and expect to find anything with a bit of scrolling. Hiding content behind curtains, like carousels do, is a bad idea.
That and the almighty "Pop-up" because we REALLY want our user to do what we want..<p>Although a carousel to display a group of images ( like car shots, the interior, etc ) seems to be the best of what I know.
The only case I implement carousels on websites is for images which are complementary to the content but not essential or as a hero element, but never absolutely never with changing text.
You'd be surprised how many companies already know this, but keep the carousel as a refrigerator to put up all of their project managers' artwork.