I personally think that while carousels are eye candy, they are just a fad. At my place of work, the designers have standardized on using them for many sites fo

I personally think that while carousels are eye candy, they are just a fad. At my place of work, the designers have standardized on using them for many sites for a year or so now, and we have been sick of them for about that long. There was a study a few years ago that showed that people are fascinated with faces and like photos on sites. But when the site designer can't decide on a single photo to best convey the myriad of ideas they are trying to relate on the page, they rotate them with a way to navigate between them using the same "carousel" pattern. Interaction on a page is good, but when you start making decisions about what they user should see next (e.g. like the the fading in and out of news headlines that used to be on news sites in the early 2000s), you may as well just show video or some fancy animation, because the user is getting distracted rather than seeing the static content they typically want to see. Slideshows that can be set to automate via "play slideshow" are just fine, though.