5 ms·
Clever 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 informat
by geddy 6y ago
Clever 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.
- santoshalper 6y agoAgree, it took me a second to realize what he was doing, then I did smile. Well played.
- ReactiveJelly 6y agoEvery 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.
- aspyct 6y agoI mostly agree with this. I've seen one valid and helpful usage of timers though: in Waze. Some things start automatically after some time, like navigation after selecting and address, or dismissing a notification. The time remaining is indicated on the corresponding button itself in a progress bar fashion.
- Xelbair 6y agoi would absolutely HATE if navigation started itself after i selected the address after some time. I'm forgetful when it comes to short term memory, and it would annoy me deeply.
- squiggleblaz 6y agoIt's surely better than Google's Maps approach. They make Maps crash while you're driving on the freeway, so you say "Okay Google, start directions home" and it says "Would you like me to start directions home? We know you're driving at bone crushing speeds on a road you've never been on in a country you're not entirely familiar with. Just look at your phone screen and find the button and crash into the side of the freeway and don't get home. It's not like you need to keep your attention on the road while driving; we are quite happy if you crash and die. But timers and explicit audio instructions are just such poor usability."
- btashton 6y agoIf you tell it to _navigate_ home it will actually pull up the directions and the go button will have a autostart timer so you don't touch anything. Ask for directions and you will have to start touching the screen.
- graup 6y agoTimers can be useful, for example ensuring a slight (500ms) delay when a user expects an interaction to be non-instant (like saving or transmitting data). I wrote about this case here: https://medium.com/@graycoding/detect-slow-and-fast-asynchronous-operations-with-javascript-fb58b32006f6 https://medium.com/@graycoding/detect-slow-and-fast-asynchro...
- hyzyla 6y agoIt's not an axiom. We can see plenty of successful realizations of carousell pattern for touch screens. Most famous is Instagram stories
- azemetre 6y agoAre those carousels? I can’t easily go back to the beginning after watching a user stories. A carousel automatically does this.
- emerged 6y agoI'm not sure if that was a design decision or just a natural artifact of using a carousel. They have a natural uncanny ability to rotate precisely when you don't want them to.
- _jal 6y agoI find it weirdly infuriating. It feels like the whatever I just tried to focus on is being pulled away by someone being annoying. That, in combination with the inevitable gimme-your-email and some other gate between me and whatever I tried to view is usually enough to make me leave the site and wish I could tag sites in my browser as "do not activate links to".
- core-questions 6y agoThat's a great idea for an extension.
- DominikPeters 6y agoFrom the source: auto: { enabled: true, interval: 3000 // HA HA! I HATE MY USERS!!! Especially the ones that aren't speed readers. }
- arp242 6y agoTop-notch trolling, 10/10 haha But yeah, carousels moving too fast is almost always an issue when I actually want to read the contents. It's one of those design patterns that just makes me want to close the website.
- koheripbal 6y agoI felt that detracted from the argument since it was really just demonstrating that a badly implemented carousel is bad - which isn't a strong argument against a well designed carousel.
- derefr 6y agoI don’t think there’s such a thing as a well-implemented carousel. Maybe in theory you could have one, if browsers could do eye-tracking, such that you could stop the carousel’s rotation as soon as the user looks at it. But without that, users are always going to land their eyes on the carousel and start reading an item in it some random interval after the carousel’s rotation timer last fired. (As, remember, users like to look away from the browser while pages load, and it takes them a random amount of time to look back.) Then, with this random "misalignment" of engagement times, the carousel content will inevitably transition out from under them. IMHO, this is exactly why users choose to not engage with content in carousels (according to the studies the author cited.) They know they’re going to not get to fully read whatever it is the carousel currently says; and they don’t know for sure how to stop the carousel from progressing; so they don’t bother with it.
- koheripbal 6y agoIf there's no such thing as a well-implemented carousel, then the demonstration shouldn't have needed to use an obviously nerf'd carousel.
- jmiserez 6y agoAnd clicking the next button just before the timeout makes it skip the 2nd slide.
- artsyca 6y agoToo slow is also a thing. They always seem to scroll the second you try to click on them. There's a neuroscience phenomenon whereby the mind fills in for the motion of the eyes, I forget what it's called but it was on HN a little while ago about how crazy the human brain really is.
- playpause 6y agoDoes that drive the point home or undermine it?