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.
One thing I've noticed is fewer clients want carousels now, but we have had quite a few request a hero image with static content and a dynamic background. They'll add 4 or 5 hero images, and we'll just smoothly transition between them every 4-5 seconds while the text/CTAs remain the same. It seems that what they really want is just some animation and flashy on the page and the only way the average person knows to do that is via a carousel. As far as I'm aware, this style of hero has been much more successful when we've done it.
Hahaha this reminds me of a client that wanted to put his entire portfolio (120+ images including blueprints with text) into a carousel despite my suggestion that he use a gallery. And because he wanted viewers to look at every image he asked me to remove all controls, including pause and previous. So it was essentially a 10 minute JavaScript powered video slideshow. The whole site became so bad on his requests that I could no longer use it toward my portfolio.
It's amazing just how versatile the word "SEO" is.
It truly is the cause of and solution to all of your website's problems.
Or to view it more cynically, SEO is the Swiss Army knife that can simultaneously excuse away poor performance while justifying additional expenditure.
Its my go to justification for any decision I want these days. I successfully used SEO to get out of vaccination (by becoming magnetized I would be unable to balance the page, you see).
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.
I once had a client’s ceo phone me up in a rage because the website was broken, how totally unprofessional it was etc.
After some confused troubleshooting, I discovered he was looking was printouts of the website he had his secretary make so he could look at it at home.
Edit: Travis is a horrible human being during the time of Uber. Maybe he has matured and mellowed out now? However, his stink is still in my mind and has forever tainted Uber for me. I will never use Uber on any of my devices, ever.
Greyball was actually a neutral tool that could also be used for good things. The regional managers of Uber could configure it to meet the needs of their market, so it had a variety of uses.
One example is that it was used to prevent taxi drivers in South American countries from targeting Uber drivers for beatings, car jackings or worse. Regardless of what you think about Uber or the taxi monopoly, it was a good thing to prevent physical harm to drivers on the service.
Even the supposedly bad uses of Greyball are, well, in the grey. Government regulators, often working at the behest of medallion owners (who generally don't drive taxis*), preferred to use fear as a tactic. They would target the drivers with whatever traffic tickets they could find, knowing that it is difficult for these drivers to fight. Greyball made this tactic harder, which forced cities into court directly with Uber, a much fairer matchup.
The really odd thing about greyball, though, is that there's actually no user requirement that the cars in the Uber app be real. They could have just "greyballed" everyone, and use standard anti-fraud practices to prevent someone requesting many trips and never starting them.
* Even where medallion owners are required to be owner-operators, they can often just sit in the taxi queue at the airport doing a crossword for a few hours.
That's some heavy duty spin right there. Anything that you can do to justify what Uber did is glossing over the fact that what they did was just wrong. The ends do not justify the means, and it's a sad problem that it's accepted at this level.
Here is something else to avoid in web (or mobile) apps: Chain of tips [1].
This is when the app forces you to click on one tip after another before you are allowed to use the app.
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.
He says much the same, but has some good ways to fix it in a game world.
I think it's much harder to have the environmental queues in an app, but I'd be curious what it'd look like.
I do think carousels have an important place in design: collapsing repetitive but possibly relevant content.
Example:
You are a contractor who makes their living off of their reputation. You have a set of testimonials (maybe 5-8).
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.
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.
The animation is still annoying and distracting to the other users who don’t need the incremental reassurance. A “Testimonials” link to a separate testimonials page would be perfectly adequate, for those users who are interested in that. It even has the benefit that they can read through the testimonials at their own pace, and that you can include longer testimonials that wouldn’t fit in the carousel box.
> A “Testimonials” link to a separate testimonials page would be perfectly adequate, for those users who are interested in that.
This is one of those things that really needs A/B testing. I'd bet the other direction: that sites get more conversions if they show a few testimonials on the landing page, than if there's a link to a page full of them but none directly on the landing page. Of course, you could just do both.
The Steam app has had a carousel at the top of the store page for years (maybe over a decade).
I actually find it quite informative, and given it's longevity on the platform maybe Valve had decided it has commercial benefit too?
The best is when the timer is not reset after you click next manually.
This page executed flawlessly on this requirement. Bonus points for having one slide with very short text to make me click through and the next slide with very long text.
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.
As long as you're fine with the vast majority of people not ever seeing the hidden carousel items, it's perfectly serviceable as an interface pattern. There are contexts where it's quite useful.
Agreed, most of my websites are essentially just pitch decks to check the box of some audience's quest for determining if they should take my seriously.
And so since its not optimizing for engagement, it is purely aesthetic, but aesthetic in the sense that it can have poor features that other serious companies use. A Fortune 500 website would have notoriously shitty aspects, do that if you want audiences that think that is clout.
Fortunately my non-North American and younger North American audiences don't even care about websites. All commerce is driven straight through chat apps. And do I really want the clientele that thinks I need a website that they will accidentally find on a search engine, or by accidentally typing a .com in the address bar by habit? no. I've considered make my fonts smaller and thinner hoping they think thats a problem and bounce, I like the aesthetics of thinner fonts but its more like thinking maybe I can just ignore the issue from the people who are less likely to be able to read it since they're not the target audience anyway.
I'm pretty much never doing things for SEO. Everyone's just going to click through from a chat app, or a twitter feed because someone else was talking about it. Since a lot of people swear by other e-commerce books that never made them a dime and have opposite advice, maybe I should release my own.
That doesn't really represent the experience of how rich the experience in chat apps are.
People get their information from heavily populated channels (one way communication chat rooms run by personalities people like, defacto "influencers"), which are forwarded to people that didn't read it. Permeating many communities and private group chats in minutes.
If it is labor intensive, its only that way for a week or two as you coordinate all of the posts with many channels.
When I read your earlier comment talking about "commerce", I was thinking of ordering a product, which strikes me as a bad fit for chat app unless it's very low volume (and a good fit for a website).
Your bio talks about fintech and digital assets, so perhaps I was imagining the wrong scenarios.
one-off "drops" are high volume and are also completed through apps these days, even instagram's marketplace is conducive to this, an immediate convenience that doesn't wait for people to think "ok thats normal", the commerce just happens. with apple pay integration and similar rails you really don't need a site - even for non-crypto users.
This one drives me nuts. So many sites abruptly stop doing something I want (scrolling) to do something I don't (resizing a map or other image), so then I have to undo two kinds of designer brain damage instead of just one.
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.
One way would be to show information sequentially, one piece after the other. Think how regular websites that you scroll down are organized - but also brochures or flyers. Yes, you have to decide on the order and one item will be the first. But you do the same with the carousel anyway. Plus, a regular layout makes it easier to scan for information.
If you must hide some information for whatever reason (to preserve space, to increase user engagement metrics), perhaps tabs would work. They can have useful labels which are better than the navigation dots on the carousel.
Back-to-fundamentals exercise for a recovering carouselist:
1. Write a short summary of every content phase, and initially just straight up list those summaries each linking to details[0].
2. As an improvement, consider if you want the user to click/tap to expand a point without leaving the page. Pay special attention to accessibility, tabindex, aria-describedby et al. as you do that.
3. At certain viewport sizes, you may put details to the side, and highlight the expanded point.
4. Then, as a final step, you could also cycle expanded points until first user input. Respect prefers reduced motion flag.
Voilà, you have a carousel but thought-through, accessible and purposeful.
[0] There is a natural limit on the number of points that can be shown. Make sure to be clear about the purpose of the widget. If a business is attempting to list more than 4–5 points, either there is a problem with focus or there are nearly non-overlapping audiences (e.g., seller/buyer) and resource should correspondingly be split into multiple entry points. These are aspects where design cannot be decoupled from business decisions.
The stats can lie. That number is not deterministic for all carousels in all contexts. There are probably contexts where the user interacts and clicks through the carousels often. However, it is hard to get it right.
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 user.
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.
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.
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.
Not all carousels are horrendous, but they are all bad. Even worse, all use cases have a significantly better, simpler solution.
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.
Not just pop-ups that are annoying. It feels like every damn time I click a link, it opens in a new tab. Even when I'm just navigating within a site. Then I end up with 2 million stale-ass tabs. If I want a new tab, I'll open a new tab myself, thank you very much.
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.
Maybe that's intentional. You've now paused to look at something you didnt originally intend to look at, but may pause long enough to read. And who's to say that "click adjacent" slide wasn't intentionally close enough in interest.
Or maybe the intent is just for the subliminal nature. So when you see the same or related images later, you'll pause just a bit longer.
