Should I Use a Carousel?
shouldiuseacarousel.com
Should I Use a Carousel?
1–10 of 98 posts
Re: Should I Use a Carousel?
#2Would 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
Re: Should I Use a Carousel?
#3A 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
Re: Should I Use a Carousel?
#4I love these snarky novelty sites making fun of bad UI trends. As soon as the carousel started going too fast I almost rage quit the tab. Well done.
Re: Should I Use a Carousel?
#5It's the classic false economy 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.
Apps like Instagram have a standard carousel for photo albums and people use them and can trust the functionality.
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...
Re: Should I Use a Carousel?
#6Would 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
Anecdotal but... I am considerably younger then 35, know how to interact with it, and hated this page with a passion.
I do think that sometimes a carousel can be fine for images, under the condition that it is only for images, and that those images can be found in a gallery that is easy to find.
Re: Should I Use a Carousel?
#7They should collect stats on how many clicked the previous slide link immediately after the slide changed (slide changes too fast).
Re: Should I Use a Carousel?
#8It's the classic false economy 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. Apps like Instagram have a standard carousel for photo albums and people use them and can trust the functionality. But most websites have varying implementations of carousels, with weird functionality (autoplay, tra…
I would posit that the only good use for carousels is with images. Craigslist is a good example of this with the thumbnails below the carousel. Its very natural with images, like flipping through a picture book. This way you can keep the relevant text in view while you look at all the pictures in the album.
Re: Should I Use a Carousel?
#9I expected this to be a flow chart like this:
Re: Should I Use a Carousel?
#10Carousels are the type of UI pattern that is only okay if you ask 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.