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Should I Use a Carousel?

shouldiuseacarousel.com

11–20 of 98 posts

Re: Should I Use a Carousel?

#11
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.

Re: Should I Use a Carousel?

#12
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?

Re: Should I Use a Carousel?

#14
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.

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.

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.

Re: Should I Use a Carousel?

#15

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

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.

This page was designed to be intentionally frustrating.

Re: Should I Use a Carousel?

#16

Carousels 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…

If you're not familiar with the term, this image viewer pattern is generally called a lightbox rather than a carousel. I generally don't see the two used interchangeably, but there's similarity to the prev/next controls, of course.

Re: Should I Use a Carousel?

#18
post #14

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. These news can be about your participation in widget related conferences, about you passing obtaining environmental goals, about some R&D project promi…

[deleted]

Re: Should I Use a Carousel?

#20
worked great for me... with javascript turned off. just scrolled down the page and read all the content at my leisure.

the only glitch was the sticky footer that fixed itself in the middle of the page instead of at the bottom of the viewport.

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.

(like others, i think image carousels with galleries are fine)

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