

In such moments, a carousel can help people browse efficiently, without clicking away from their cart. It's easy to be unsure what moving forward or back in a purchase flow will do - and we're also really prone to getting upsold on "related" items. Shopping on the web remains a fraught experience for many. (I won’t name the company where I experienced this, but rest assured, I speak from experience on this point.)Īmazon uses carousels to keep you shopping without leaving the current web page. Because, ironically, no one remembers it’s there. This carousel content is rarely added with a clear intention of solving a user need, and therefore attracts few clicks from readers - and all too often, it just sticks around far longer than intended.

Let it become a dumping groundĪll too often, a website’s carousel becomes the place where everything that people want on the homepage, but can’t add more permanently, goes to die. But it shouldn’t come at the cost of irritating people. Of course, we’re all trying to improve internal metrics. Instead, it’s likely driven by a desire to improve some important internal metric (like ad views) rather than any interest of your users’. If the person asking for a carousel can’t explain why using a carousel is good for your website visitors, it won’t be. I define the goal of web and digital product design as “finding the point where user need and business need intersect.” All too often, people call for a carousel for business needs alone, not user needs. When it’s for the company, not the “user” Plus, let’s not forget about banner blindness.ĭon’t. But like most methods of increasing ad views, this just results in a terrible, unnecessarily laborious experience for the people a content site is supposed to be serving: the readers. Surely someone thought this was a very clever way of ensuring more ad views per page of their website. Many clickbait-y sites use carousel-like designs to “chunk” their “articles” into bite-sized pieces you have to click through to read the entirety of. If you replace that single, clear message with a multiplicity of ideas, well, you’re just upping the chance people won’t understand what your company does, and worse, decrease your conversion rates. Typically, that means having a single, clear message that’s easy for your target audience to understand. As soon as a visitor hits your website, they should be able to tell what your company’s all about. And beyond all the issues of findability and accessibility mentioned above, there’s a potentially bigger issue:īrand confusion. In your homepage’s hero sectionĪs mentioned above, a homepage carousel at the very top of your website can severely hamper a visitor’s very first experience of your site - arguably the worst time to do it. Let’s start with the do nots! Don’t use a carousel. When your client or team just won’t budge on using that carousel, it’s worth keeping a few dos and don’ts in mind, so you don’t derail your site’s overall user experience. Now, on to some dos and don’ts if you end up having to use a carousel. If it doesn’t get all the clicks they’re hoping for, you’ll have a strong argument for replacing it.

If your clients or stakeholders insist on having the carousel, you can suggest that they keep an eye on performance of this element over time. Taking that control away can ruin an otherwise lovely experience.
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So let’s get going, shall we? How to convince your clients not to use a carouselīefore we dig too deep here, please know that there’s no accounting for taste, and your client may well insist you use a carousel on their site. Failing that, how to design a carousel that doesn’t ruin your carefully crafted UX.Persuade your clients to forget they ever had such an idea.Or whatever your preferred expression of existential fear and loathing might be.īut never fear! We’ve got some tips on how to: If you’re like many designers, you give a quiet little groan. (And for most of this article, we’ll use carousel, just to keep things clear.) But whatever word comes out of their mouth, you know immediately what they mean. They may call it a carousel, slider, slideshow, or gallery.
