How effective are carousels as a way of showcasing website content?
Carousels are very ineffective at showcasing website content. As part of a contract in which I’m helping to redesign a company’s website, I researched the effectiveness of carousels and found a plethora of research showing carousels (1) result in visitors missing the site’s messages and (2) make sites harder to use. Below, I’ve detailed the specific findings that back these claims up and included sources for the related research/studies.
(1) Visitors miss your messages:
- Research shows that users miss messages in moving carousels — not only the hidden 2nd, 3rd, 4th messages, but also very first message.In this study, a user missed the main message (which was in huge font in the center of the homepage) because it was in a moving carousel. [source]
- “Banner Blindness” – users can ignore messages in carousels because they can look like an ad when highly styled or moving. [source] [source 2]
- Studies show that users don’t click on carousels. In this study, around 1% of homepage visitors clicked on the carousel at all; of those who did click, 89% clicked the first image, meaning that they missed seeing the following images. [source]
- With one message highlighted at a time, relevant content can be hidden under a stack of carousel images and users may never see them. For example, if you have 4 carousel slides targeting the 4 customer segments, the homepage will alienate a large portion of users when they first land on the site. If a Bank comes to the site, there is a 25% chance of the carousel being targeted to them; if the first image they see is targeted to MNO’s, they’ll look away to the carousel to find information relevant to them, rather than waiting for content in the carousel to speak to them.
(2) Visitors find sites with carousels less easy-to-use:
- An eye tracking study testing 3 types of carousels showed that users found them distracting (4 on a 1-5 scale). [source]
- A carousel could decrease homepage load time if the images are high-quality (1 high-quality image is faster to load than 4).
- Moving UI elements can pose problems for international users as well as accessibility (screen readers and users with mobility issues). Slow-reading users can also get annoyed because when a carousel moves automatically, users lose control over the UI and their own reading experience. [source]
Related resources:
- On UX Stack Exchange: Are carousels effective?
- On UX Stack Exchange: Using a carousel on home page or not?
- On UX Stack Exchange: Are carousels effective on non-Ecommerce sites?
- Blogpost: “Carousel Interaction Stats“
- Blogpost: “Don’t Use Automatic Image Sliders or Carousels, Ignore the Fad“
- Sarcastic website: Should I Use A Carousel?
Why do the popular browsers copy each other’s user interfaces?
Why do all the popular browsers blatantly copy each other’s user interface?
See these screenshots to understand what I mean:
Mozilla Firefox (see Australis is landing in Firefox Nightly and Measuring Australis)
Update: A…
Why do the popular browsers copy each other’s user interfaces?
Why do all the popular browsers blatantly copy each other’s user interface?
See these screenshots to understand what I mean:
Mozilla Firefox (see Australis is landing in Firefox Nightly and Measuring Australis)
Update: A…
Why does backspace go back a page? This behavior is so frustrating!
When using a browser, like Firefox, I appreciate that I can easily navigate my tab history with Alt+← (for back) and Alt+→ (for forward.) That makes perfectly good sense to me, and I’ve used that keyboard shortcut for the longest time.
I frequently do text input in web pages. On some pages (but not all) when I want to erase the last few characters I just typed, I tap Backspace several times. Tap tap tap. And then, lo-and-behold, my browser is leaving the page I was on and going back in the tab history. I may have lost what I was writing. And I am a very unhappy user.
Chrome developers have decided to remove this, see this story from Ars Technica:
Google hovers over delete button for backspace nav shortcut in Chrome
Google: Only 0.04 percent of page views navigate via the backspace button.
… We have UseCounters showing that 0.04 percent of page views navigate back via the backspace button and 0.005 percent of page views are after a form interaction.
This means that up to 1 in 8 backspace navigations could be losing user data.
I hypothesize that many of these are accidental – I lost text again a few days ago because of this feature.
Why did browser creators think this is such a great feature? Alt+← is unambiguous. But to overload the Backspace key with this behavior is atrocious! I can see from a quick Google search that many others are frustrated by this.
- How did this come about?
- Is the standard default behavior too strongly established to reverse course?
- Can we change it, and what would be the plan to do so?
Canonical paths to blocking this
I’ll be logging the canonical ways to turn this off for browsers here, and I do not want to see software add-ons here:
How much darker should yellow be get the same contrast as other colors?
By how much should the color yellow be darkened to get the same contrast values as other colors displayed on a computer screen?
This is something that i would do by sight, but i was wondering if there aren’t any rules around…
Who created the Mac Mickey pointer cursor?
I just found out why the mouse cursor is slightly tilted*, and asked myself why the pointer cursor is a little Mickey hand. Do you guys know why is it like this and who invented it?
Related Question: Why is the mouse curso…
Will I confuse users by making my whole site HTTPS?
I’d like to make every page on my site load through HTTPS by default (less hassle at my end, personally I prefer HTTPS if given a choice as a user).
However, I’m concerned that seeing the HTTPS icon / green bar in their brow…
Is there a better term than ACCOUNT (as in User Account)
We are using “login” but I don’t like that b/c it has a lot meanings:
Verb (the act of logging in)
Noun : their login ID (“what’s my login”), ID and password (what’s my login) their entire account (“my login was deleted”)
…
Is there a better term than ACCOUNT (as in User Account)
We are using “login” but I don’t like that b/c it has a lot meanings:
Verb (the act of logging in)
Noun : their login ID (“what’s my login”), ID and password (what’s my login) their entire account (“my login was deleted”)
…
Is it necessary for people who program mobile games to also become graphic designers?
NO. NO. NO. NO…. NO… OMG NO.
For games, art is not an afterthought. It is not something you wipe up at the last minute, and be done with it. If programming is skeleton, design is organs, art is skin and hair. It is what make your game a presentable product instead of a barebone concept.
Think about your 3 pillars: Art, Design and programming, each is equally important to the other two. Each should have its own dedicated team, if not team, at least a person. You should have an artist, a designer and a programmer. Because these disciplines require different training, different way of thinking, and each solves its own set of unique problems. You can’t cut corners on these. You can’t hire an programmer and require her to also design your game, you can’t hire an artist and ask him to program your game.
That’s not to say cross-field training is unnecessary. An artist who know programming would know the potential technical difficulties for an art asset and try to create it differently, while a designer who knows a little bit of art, would make communication a lot easier if he draw out his level or character design. He might not have the caliber to create the final in game art, but a picture sure beats 10 paragraphs of description.
For small start ups, these responsibility often blend together. Artists needs to know programming, programers sometimes got caught up and have to help out with art. But just because some people are doing it, doesn’t mean it is a good practice, and it certainly doesn’t mean it is a necessity.
Hire an artist, Gosh. We’re not that expensive! A lot of us are more than happy to work with less money if the project is interesting enough. Don’t ask your poor programmers to draw stick figures.