Should I use a carousel?

I&#x27;ve been waiting and hoping for the anti-carousel movement to gain cultural traction among web developers for some time. The fact that this page has made it to the front page of HN gives me hope that momentum will begin to increase more rapidly now.<p>Some people seem to think carousels are some sort of design cheat code, making it possible to include five pieces of content in the space of one. It&#x27;s almost the front-end equivalent of a TODO comment.<p><pre><code> &#x2F;&#x2F; TODO: decide which of these things actually matters. &#x2F;&#x2F; In the meantime, let&#x27;s just show all five one-by-one </code></pre> They don&#x27;t even work for images. When a person wants to browse a collection of images, they&#x27;ll want to choose when to skip to the next image themselves. That&#x27;s why Facebook&#x27;s image albums don&#x27;t automatically move to the next image after five seconds.<p>And those fucking carousel pagination &quot;dots&quot;... just when designers had begun to catch on to the fact that numbered pagination links need to be big enough to click easily, along came carousels to preserve the tradition of impossibly small UI elements that are difficult to interact with.<p>Fuck carousels.

I love the short timers on blocks of text too large to read properly before it moves on. I kept clicking back and of course starting from the beginning of the quote to remind myself of the flow and then SWOOSH it moved onto the next one. I did that about half a dozen times and definitely felt my stress levels rise. It makes the point very well!

They really seem to mean it:<p><pre><code> &lt;!-- Hold on now! If you&#x27;re looking here to figure out how to use this carousel, STOP! Read this site carefully, then go smell some flowers or do something else instead. Every time you use a carousel, a kitten dies. &#x2F;\_&#x2F;\ ____&#x2F; o o \ &#x2F;~____ =ø= &#x2F; (______)__m_m) Think of the kittens! --&gt;</code></pre>

Is there another design pattern that is so universally appealing to clients but reviled by developers than the carousel? I don&#x27;t like them either but honestly, it&#x27;s such a great idea <i>theoretically</i>...we&#x27;re all accustomed to the pattern of a box with moving images, since at least e 1960s...and we also know the frustration of cramming a variety of content into a screen size worth of real estate...so why wouldn&#x27;t a web carousel work?<p>Unlike other flawed design patterns, such as horizontal scrolling or a reliance on mouseover popups, it&#x27;s hard to assert, without referring to &quot;studies&quot;, why the carousel is just bad in a way that doesn&#x27;t sound like I&#x27;m only stating my hoity-toity developer preferences.

The objection to a carousel is really an objection to the reasons that people use carousels--to satisfy a few high-maintenance stakeholders, whether internal or external. But satisfying high-value stakeholders is a real business goal on a lot of websites. Carousels are a great way to manage that.<p>People also tend to overstate the negative impacts of carousels because they have not internalized the patterns of search and social traffic. On the websites I manage, 80-90% of visits do not start on the homepage! So only a very small number of visitors are actually seeing the carousel at all.<p>Most homepages today are really just another landing for a particular subset of your traffic. You&#x27;ll get people who are totally unfamiliar with you, and need an intro. Or you&#x27;ll get people who are intimately familiar with you and want to see if their pet thing is important to you--a good fit for a carousel.<p>Carousels are for promotion, not navigation, so task-oriented usability studies are not really applicable. Online promotions deliberately reduce usability in the interest of capturing attention.

Could we also stop using silly scrolling hacks like here <a href="http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;mac-pro&#x2F;</a>, please? Thanks!

I was expecting a flat out NO in a big font, but the page manages to make the point much better.

I spent a while getting mad that arrow keys didn&#x27;t work and that the timers were too short to read the text.<p>Then I got it.

Is it intentional that the carousel switches so fast that reading the whole text displayed is almost impossible? (It may be due to my not being native English speaker, but it anyway...)

After reading the Nielsen&#x27; article [1] this page links to, I was wondering: this article keeps talking about &quot;their user&quot;. Does that mean they tested this on one person, and then passed those findings as universal, or did they properly test this on dozens or hunderds of people?<p>I&#x27;m not contesting that carousels are bad (I&#x27;m not a web designer, but as a user I ignore most, except the one on the front page of Steam [2], but that may well be because I&#x27;m used to their biggest promotions and releases being there.) I&#x27;m just concerned about the quality of the test the Nielsen people did.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.nngroup.com/articles/auto-forwarding/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nngroup.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;auto-forwarding&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="http://steampowered.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;steampowered.com</a>

The worst things about carousels that I find are when 1) it&#x27;s not obviously a carousel and 2) when it auto-advances on a fixed timeout, and it&#x27;s impossible to stay on one &#x27;page&#x27; and actually read it. Extremely frustrating.

As others have mentioned scattered through the comments, of <i>course</i> you shouldn&#x27;t use a carousel like this one. It&#x27;s easy to make a feature so poorly that it doesn&#x27;t work. Show me the best carousel you can find, in the most appropriate situation, and then explain why there was <i>still</i> a better option. That would be convincing.<p>It is funny, though.

I often find myself having to display a wildly unpredictable number of images on a page. The image size ratio is about 3 height x 1 width and I can have anywhere from 1-40 images.<p>Carousel&#x27;s do suck, but what other options do I have?

IMHO, the only use case suitable for a carousel is showing eye-candy pictures.

&#x2F;&#x2F; HA HA! I HATE MY USERS!!! Especially the ones that aren&#x27;t speed readers.<p>Teehee, a brilliant site.

How about &quot;Right tool for the job&quot;?<p>I think using carousels for content that is non-essential but that the user may want to see more of is fine. For example, photos -- some users are happy with 1 photo, and some want to see them all.<p>This is a straw man that demonstrates hiding the main content behind a carousel is bad.

Carousels&#x2F;sliders are fine so long as the content is mostly superficial and they aren&#x27;t huge (which is an annoying trend). I wouldn&#x27;t use them for anything important, I would use them for some nice pictures to make a homepage less boring.

Isn&#x27;t it kinda weird to quote yourself?<p>&quot;It&#x27;s kinda weird to quote yourself.&quot; -rschmitty

Does anyone have an instance where a carousel has worked well (with A&#x2F;B testing or something else scientific to back it up)?

Rate my carousel:<p><a href="http://www.kongregate.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kongregate.com&#x2F;</a><p>In our case, the whole homepage is links to games. The real reason we use the carousel has been mentioned in this thread - there is a lot of pressure to put things in a featured position. The fact is, only the first few positions are effective, particularly the first. But everything that goes in is initally in the first position, then gets demoted.<p>One benefit of that is that if someone comes to the site, plays the first game, then comes back 5 days later, they can expect to find the same game in 3rd or 4th position.<p>I&#x27;m open to other ideas, of course.

My personal rule on carousels is that they&#x27;re okay to use if you don&#x27;t care if your user only sees one of the slides. But if that&#x27;s the case then you might as well just not have a carousel in the first place.

Why not use it just to show pretty pictures? This is nice.

Iam not sure, but you should definitely use a faster Webserver ;-)

&gt; Carousels are effective at being able to tell people in Marketing&#x2F;Senior Management that their latest idea is on the Home Page. Use them to put content that users will ignore on your Home Page.<p>That is gold. Pure gold.<p>The suits will love the flashy new thing that shows the world their &#x27;genius&#x27;. Meanwhile you&#x27;re just using it to balance a layout, knowing that users will gloss over it 99 times out of 100.

This is more a case of &quot;Should I use carousels poorly?&quot; No!<p>They have there place, but when overused it&#x27;s a poor use just like the the &quot;Web 2.0 drop shadow on everything icons&quot; and the blink tag before it. People see a element and decide that everything needs that element.<p>Carousel do work well for displaying a large&#x2F;unknown number of images. Text and autotimers are almost always a bad idea IMO.

I love that the carousel on this site also moves too fast for you to digest what the hell it&#x27;s saying, further enforcing its point.

Very neat example. But OP raises a point, and as we see there&#x27;s the issue but no proposed solution. What should be used instead?

I&#x27;m probably not the typical carousel user (or the target user of this article), but I&#x27;m using the bootstrap carousel on my site (learning2spell.com) in what I think is a successful manner.<p>It&#x27;s not on the landing page, but as part of a test. I have one question presented at a time, and the user is moved on to the next question once a question is answered. The carousel lets them easily see how many questions are in the test, how many they have answered and have left to answer, as well as moving back and forth in the test.<p>I think like most things it not inherently bad in itself - its how you use it that matters.

I agree they can be annoying, but teaching that all and every use of carousels is devastating to your business is careless and wrong. All of these very profitable companies use carousels and probably laugh at the short-sightedness of this sentiment.<p><pre><code> http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F; http:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;browse&#x2F;home&#x2F;shop_mac http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rakuten.com&#x2F; http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ebay.com&#x2F;electronics https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F; http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;default.aspx etc..</code></pre>

This page has one of my biggest gripes with poorly implemented carousels: Stop moving the darn thing when I&#x27;ve clicked to navigate! I&#x27;m trying to read something and the thing is spinning all over the place.

“Carousels are effective at being able to tell people in Marketing&#x2F;Senior Management that their latest idea is on the Home Page.&quot;<p>Precisely correct. This is why they exist and why they are so useful at resolving disputes.

Another item to add to the list is: you can never make the thing slow enough for your average visitor to actually read the thing. Maybe this was in there, I&#x27;m not sure because each slide whizzed by too fast.

Anyone notice the comment (view source) on the bottom in red? Whoa! How?

I looked at this article expecting something that was related to the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_Carousel" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Kodak_Carousel</a>.<p>So I clicked on the link, didn&#x27;t see a Kodak Carousel to my surprise, and started reading the text. I got annoyed very quickly (&quot;why is this moving so fast? Did I click on anything?&quot;). And just when I was ready to say &quot;screw this&quot; I got that my very behavior had just exactly proven what Jared&#x27;s point was.<p>Touché!

So if not a carousel, an accordion, or maybe a wizard?

I have already forwarded this to some people I know...

Worse than carousels - web pages that play videos or adverts with audio attached automatically.<p>I thought we got away from that 10 years ago.

I&#x27;m guilty of clicking the carousel on Newegg a few times and I&#x27;ve actually caught some news from carousels.<p>But still if they all vanished in the night I would not complain.<p>Are &quot;slideshows&quot; considered the same or something different from carousels?

In the corporate world, a demo isn&#x27;t a demo until someone does something with a grid. For landing pages, is a demo not a demo until someone steps through a carousel?

At least THIS carousel doesn&#x27;t break the back button.

The YC landing page has had an image carousel for a while. I don&#x27;t think it has hurt them but then again that page hasn&#x27;t been redesigned in years

I was expecting a site like <a href="http://www.arechairslikefacebook.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.arechairslikefacebook.com&#x2F;</a>

I never thought of that mechanism as a thing which had a name. It was just &quot;another stupid page-flipping site&quot;.

For sure, don&#x27;t use a fast moving carousel with multiple sentences on each slide and no way to pause.

FINALLY! ahem...excuse the enthusiasm.

So much time wasted putting essential content into a carousel…and making it work.

I only read the first slide.

I just want to point out that buying a domain for this seems like overkill.

Carousel is a bad practice.

I read all slides. With no more than 12 clicks on those dots :likeAboss:

The carousel rotates too fast for me to read the longer quotes.

I&#x27;ll be the one to come out and say I don&#x27;t mind carousels, as long as it&#x27;s not overdone (don&#x27;t give me 50 different animations on the same page, thanks).

haha, the carousel is moving to the next slide too fast to read fully -_-&#x27;

Think of the kittens! lol.

I honestly found the presentation somewhat compelling.