Manila Folder Boeing 777 guy. Please take note.
Should I Use a Carousel?
81–90 of 98 posts
Re: Should I Use a Carousel?
#82I've often found Carousels do a good job when there is repetitive information, 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.
Repetitive ... useless ... information. How much does "My daughter loved the gift. Sue K., Topeka" add to your impression of an offer or product?
well, if Sue K liked it...
Re: Should I Use a Carousel?
#83And yet: https://web.archive.org/web/20190913224546/https:/twitter.co... (I'm unsure why Gary removed these tweets, maybe something did change his mind on this.)
I can guess why he removed them: it’s a really bad example in support of carousels.
The carousel on that page is one of the very few clickable things, and literally the only thing on the entire page that doesn’t either take you to obviously-unrelated content (by which I mean a different site, or the blog or privacy links in the footer), or start the program (log in, sign up, get started, start now)—that is, if you want to know more about what this thing actually is, the carousel is your only hope, if you don’t want to sign up or start the program yet, and I expect that to be true for most visitors.
The measurement is made even more bad by the fact that the carousel inherently encourages a large number of clicks: there are three slides, but because there’s no indication of that (no progress indicator, and no transitions) I honestly expect the typical person that interacts with that carousel to click the arrow at least eight times: maybe once and a half through, then “wait, was that it? Did I waste my interaction time on that?” and a bit more fiddling to confirm that yes, that actually is all that’s there. So in that heat map, divide the carousel arrow clicks by at least eight to get a more realistic picture of things. (The heat map reveals other problems with the site, too, things that look like they might be links and people click on them, but they’re not.)
The carousel on that page is terrible and should be abolished with prejudice. Just flatten the slides, lay them out vertically! It’d be substantially superior, make the concept much easier to grasp.
Re: Should I Use a Carousel?
#84Yes, 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 aw…
Yeah. Though the OP is still doing an important job: giving people ammo to call out these faux UX justifications in internal meetings.
Re: Should I Use a Carousel?
#85Clever 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.
Every time I do UI stuff, I tell my boss that timers are a code smell. They're either too long, and the user gets bored or confused, or they're too short and the program bucks the user off and runs on without them. "Skip" buttons don't work. If you can have a Skip button, just make it a Next button and kill the timer.
It's not an axiom. We can see plenty of successful realizations of carousell pattern for touch screens. Most famous is Instagram stories
Re: Should I Use a Carousel?
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Doesn't a lightbox make the rest of the page dark? Amazon doesn't do this, the carousel doesn't take up any more space than the original image.
The core difference is that a “carousel” as intended here generally contains text, and that’s specifically why it’s a bad pattern.
“Scroll-through” photo albums are a fair way to display photos, however I still personally prefer a gallery for photos instead, exactly like it works on your phone for example (gallery + “lightbox”)
Re: Should I Use a Carousel?
#87I had a music video app which was a carousel with YouTube embeds
The use cases for a carousel are fairly limited
Re: Should I Use a Carousel?
#88Here'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. Google's first search result gave me Amazon, eBay, Walmart Target, Etsy, Best Buy, Macys, The Home Depot,Wish and Craigslist. Only four don'…
> Big eCommerce sites will test and optimize every pixel and if something doesn't work, they'll replace it with something better. Define "better". A carousel might cause some users to buy more, but others to get annoyed and frustrated.
"better" is whatever will positively impact the goal of the website or page.
A carousel could cause some users to but less and annoy even more users. It comes down to testing, but I've never seen any clear cut data saying that as soon as you put a carousel on a page it will always have a negative impact.
Re: Should I Use a Carousel?
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every time I do UI stuff, I tell my boss that timers are a code smell. They're either too long, and the user gets bored or confused, or they're too short and the program bucks the user off and runs on without them. "Skip" buttons don't work. If you can have a Skip button, just make it a Next button and kill the timer.
It's not an axiom. We can see plenty of successful realizations of carousell pattern for touch screens. Most famous is Instagram stories
Are those carousels? I can’t easily go back to the beginning after watching a user stories. A carousel automatically does this.
Re: Should I Use a Carousel?
#90I 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. It needed to portray: “We are big enough for you to consider doing business with us and to buy our services”
As a developer at an agency, this is far more common than you think. Most of the sites we build are for small businesses that only have one or two products/services. By putting a few carousels with stock images and some meaningless language or testimonials, it makes it look (or at least makes them feel like it looks) like they do a lot more and are a lot more important and bigger than they are actually are. Half of our job is to make the client seem bigger and better than they really are and carousels are one of the ways that designers and clients like to do that.