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I've been waiting and hoping for the anti-carousel movement to gain cultural traction among web developers for some time. The fact that this page has made it to

by h2s 13y ago

I've been waiting and hoping for the anti-carousel movement to gain cultural traction among web developers for some time. The fact that this page has made it to the front page of HN gives me hope that momentum will begin to increase more rapidly now. Some people seem to think carousels are some sort of design cheat code, making it possible to include five pieces of content in the space of one. It's almost the front-end equivalent of a TODO comment. // TODO: decide which of these things actually matters. // In the meantime, let's just show all five one-by-one They don't even work for images. When a person wants to browse a collection of images, they'll want to choose when to skip to the next image themselves. That's why Facebook's image albums don't automatically move to the next image after five seconds. And those fucking carousel pagination "dots"... just when designers had begun to catch on to the fact that numbered pagination links need to be big enough to click easily, along came carousels to preserve the tradition of impossibly small UI elements that are difficult to interact with. Fuck carousels.

coherentpony 13y ago
Just FYI, I loved reading this comment.
jd 13y ago
With the exception of image gallery carousels for mobile devices. Those can work great.
- lysol 13y ago
  They do, except when it's a desktop-targeted image carousel with no support for touch events other than simple presses.
at-fates-hands 13y ago
I would also add the inconsistency in how they are coded. Some allow pausing on the slide, others do not. Sometimes you can click the pagination buttons to get to the next slide, sometimes you can't. Some have arrows for moving to the next slide, some won't have pagination, and others are just a timed slide show - which is by far the worst. It's a user's nightmare anytime you're presented with a carousels since you never know what functionality, if any you're going to get. I'm thinking this is why so many people simply discard them entirely now. They've become the most useless web dressing ever.
- baddox 13y ago
  I love the ones that advance slides on a timer regardless of user clicks, so you can manually advance from slide 1 to slide 2 and the timer will kick in 100ms later, advancing you to slide 3.
  - sbarre 13y ago
    that's just bad code though..
    - baddox 13y ago
      All code that outputs a bad user experience is bad code.
  - rjuyal 13y ago
    hahaha
bierko 13y ago
Since you mention the dots, I wonder if carousels gained traction after smartphones (i.e. the paging dots on the iOS home screen).
- phillmv 13y ago
  I don't think so. Back in 2009 I was responsible for adding another carousel monstrosity to the world and that was just before smartphones exploded. Certainly not what I had in mind.
devils_advocate 13y ago
I like carousels when they're used for the right purposes ... it's my favorite way to view a slide-show (so long as I can control how it advances). On the other hand, I can't think of any other valid reason to use one.
jaequery 13y ago
op's page ironically made the carousel useful
- mark-r 13y ago
  Really? You must be a speed reader. The first couple of images seemed to stick around forever, but there wasn't nearly enough time to read the denser ones. It also makes a difference that it was the entire content of the page, so there were no distractions. That will never be the case on a real page.
lifeformed 13y ago
What you guys think about my carousel implementation? IMO, it is done tastefully. I made this site for a friend of mine: http://indieviddy.com/ http://indieviddy.com/ It's just an aesthetic presentation of non-essential content (random portfolio items).
- laumars 13y ago
  Looks pretty, but there's no (obvious) way to control it (so when items drop off you can't get them back - that is, until they eventually loop back around again). There's a couple of other issues with your site as well - it seems fixed to a very wide width (possibly due to the carousel?) which is not only quite significantly wider than many laptop displays / non-maximized browsers would reach. And you seem to have some character encoding issues as you're apostrophes are being replaced with �. On a personal note, some of the fonts are too big as well. Your site reads more comfortable when I've zoomed out twice (which also fixes the width issue as well). Aside that, the landing page looks well polished enough (I didn't venture further in). Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:22.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/22.0
  - lifeformed 13y ago
    Thanks for the feedback. The portfolio wasn't meant to be solely accessed through the carousel - there's a dedicated page for it, and the carousel was just a "look at all these things I've worked on" statement. I guess I didn't clearly communicate that. You aren't really meant to navigate it, rather just to look at it's breadth and click on one if it caught you eye. The width is indeed because of the carousel - I meant for it to go of the page. Is that causing weird scrolling problems? It's supposed to be overflow-x: hidden. Is that causing weird tablet scrolling issues? You're not supposed to be able to scroll horizontally. I'll have to look into the character encoding issue - thanks for that report.
    - laumars 13y ago
      > Thanks for the feedback. The portfolio wasn't meant to be solely accessed through the carousel - there's a dedicated page for it, and the carousel was just a "look at all these things I've worked on" statement. I guess I didn't clearly communicate that. You aren't really meant to navigate it, rather just to look at it's breadth and click on one if it caught you eye. I realised that was more a showcase than for navigation. What I meant was that if one did catch your eye just as it was falling off the page - you can't bring it back. It can be argued as a pretty miner issue I'll grant you. But that was my immediate thought when I saw stuff drop off the side :) > The width is indeed because of the carousel - I meant for it to go of the page. Is that causing weird scrolling problems? It's supposed to be overflow-x: hidden. Is that causing weird tablet scrolling issues? You're not supposed to be able to scroll horizontally. This is was in Firefox on ArchLinux (laptop). I definitely have a scrollbar at the bottom. Sorry mate :( > I'll have to look into the character encoding issue - thanks for that report. I notice you don't have any meta tags for encodings. I wonder if that might be causing the issue (I should stress - I'm not an expert on these matters): http://www.w3.org/TR/html5-diff/#character-encoding http://www.w3.org/TR/html5-diff/#character-encoding
enraged_camel 13y ago
>>That's why Facebook's image albums don't automatically move to the next image after five seconds. Well, now that you opened your big mouth... :) Aside from showing upper management that their latest bullshit idea is on the website, carousels also serve another purpose, which is to make the website look "alive" and "dynamic" and "interactive." And that's just the tip of the buzzword iceberg. Ultimately it is one of the many symptoms of a very common phenomenon: design decisions made by people who don't know anything about design. In most cases these people are directors and C-level executives.
AUmrysh 13y ago
The only place I've seen appropriate use of a carousel is on game review websites where they're showing the latest news/reviews/whatever. Those seem to work pretty well, although I rarely use them to navigate, sometimes an interesting image or piece of text will pop up on it and I'll find a new game I didn't know about.
rhizome 13y ago
just when designers had begun to catch on to the fact that numbered pagination links need to be big enough to click easily You may have dreamed this part.
throwaway420 13y ago
You're right about what you said, but web designers and developers aren't usually to blame for this. The problem isn't cultural traction among web designers and developers, but among the CEOs and marketing guys and VPs who, for egotistical or political reasons, order the designers to implement the site in a certain way. They love carousels because, as you said, carousels feel like a design cheat code that let you fit 5 (or more) times the amount of content in the same amount of space. Instead of actually researching your niche and making a choice about what content is most important to solve your customers' problems and your own goals and what content gets priority on a page, they take the lazy way out and order the designer to fit everything on the screen. Most decent web developers who place a premium on UX will not usually suggest a carousel as the best way to display some content on the screen, and they may fight those decisions as best as they can, but at the end of the day the people who pay the bills will make these decisions.
- mathattack 13y ago
  It's very much the fight of simplicity versus committee-think.

by h2s 13y ago

coherentpony 13y ago

Just FYI, I loved reading this comment.

jd 13y ago

With the exception of image gallery carousels for mobile devices. Those can work great.

lysol 13y ago
They do, except when it's a desktop-targeted image carousel with no support for touch events other than simple presses.

at-fates-hands 13y ago

I would also add the inconsistency in how they are coded. Some allow pausing on the slide, others do not. Sometimes you can click the pagination buttons to get to the next slide, sometimes you can't. Some have arrows for moving to the next slide, some won't have pagination, and others are just a timed slide show - which is by far the worst. It's a user's nightmare anytime you're presented with a carousels since you never know what functionality, if any you're going to get. I'm thinking this is why so many people simply discard them entirely now. They've become the most useless web dressing ever.

baddox 13y ago
I love the ones that advance slides on a timer regardless of user clicks, so you can manually advance from slide 1 to slide 2 and the timer will kick in 100ms later, advancing you to slide 3.
- sbarre 13y ago
  that's just bad code though..
  - baddox 13y ago
    All code that outputs a bad user experience is bad code.
- rjuyal 13y ago
  hahaha

bierko 13y ago

Since you mention the dots, I wonder if carousels gained traction after smartphones (i.e. the paging dots on the iOS home screen).

phillmv 13y ago
I don't think so. Back in 2009 I was responsible for adding another carousel monstrosity to the world and that was just before smartphones exploded. Certainly not what I had in mind.

devils_advocate 13y ago

I like carousels when they're used for the right purposes ... it's my favorite way to view a slide-show (so long as I can control how it advances). On the other hand, I can't think of any other valid reason to use one.

jaequery 13y ago

op's page ironically made the carousel useful

mark-r 13y ago
Really? You must be a speed reader. The first couple of images seemed to stick around forever, but there wasn't nearly enough time to read the denser ones. It also makes a difference that it was the entire content of the page, so there were no distractions. That will never be the case on a real page.

lifeformed 13y ago

What you guys think about my carousel implementation? IMO, it is done tastefully. I made this site for a friend of mine: http://indieviddy.com/ http://indieviddy.com/ It's just an aesthetic presentation of non-essential content (random portfolio items).

laumars 13y ago
Looks pretty, but there's no (obvious) way to control it (so when items drop off you can't get them back - that is, until they eventually loop back around again). There's a couple of other issues with your site as well - it seems fixed to a very wide width (possibly due to the carousel?) which is not only quite significantly wider than many laptop displays / non-maximized browsers would reach. And you seem to have some character encoding issues as you're apostrophes are being replaced with �. On a personal note, some of the fonts are too big as well. Your site reads more comfortable when I've zoomed out twice (which also fixes the width issue as well). Aside that, the landing page looks well polished enough (I didn't venture further in). Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:22.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/22.0
- lifeformed 13y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. The portfolio wasn't meant to be solely accessed through the carousel - there's a dedicated page for it, and the carousel was just a "look at all these things I've worked on" statement. I guess I didn't clearly communicate that. You aren't really meant to navigate it, rather just to look at it's breadth and click on one if it caught you eye. The width is indeed because of the carousel - I meant for it to go of the page. Is that causing weird scrolling problems? It's supposed to be overflow-x: hidden. Is that causing weird tablet scrolling issues? You're not supposed to be able to scroll horizontally. I'll have to look into the character encoding issue - thanks for that report.
  - laumars 13y ago
    > Thanks for the feedback. The portfolio wasn't meant to be solely accessed through the carousel - there's a dedicated page for it, and the carousel was just a "look at all these things I've worked on" statement. I guess I didn't clearly communicate that. You aren't really meant to navigate it, rather just to look at it's breadth and click on one if it caught you eye. I realised that was more a showcase than for navigation. What I meant was that if one did catch your eye just as it was falling off the page - you can't bring it back. It can be argued as a pretty miner issue I'll grant you. But that was my immediate thought when I saw stuff drop off the side :) > The width is indeed because of the carousel - I meant for it to go of the page. Is that causing weird scrolling problems? It's supposed to be overflow-x: hidden. Is that causing weird tablet scrolling issues? You're not supposed to be able to scroll horizontally. This is was in Firefox on ArchLinux (laptop). I definitely have a scrollbar at the bottom. Sorry mate :( > I'll have to look into the character encoding issue - thanks for that report. I notice you don't have any meta tags for encodings. I wonder if that might be causing the issue (I should stress - I'm not an expert on these matters): http://www.w3.org/TR/html5-diff/#character-encoding http://www.w3.org/TR/html5-diff/#character-encoding

enraged_camel 13y ago

>>That's why Facebook's image albums don't automatically move to the next image after five seconds. Well, now that you opened your big mouth... :) Aside from showing upper management that their latest bullshit idea is on the website, carousels also serve another purpose, which is to make the website look "alive" and "dynamic" and "interactive." And that's just the tip of the buzzword iceberg. Ultimately it is one of the many symptoms of a very common phenomenon: design decisions made by people who don't know anything about design. In most cases these people are directors and C-level executives.

AUmrysh 13y ago

The only place I've seen appropriate use of a carousel is on game review websites where they're showing the latest news/reviews/whatever. Those seem to work pretty well, although I rarely use them to navigate, sometimes an interesting image or piece of text will pop up on it and I'll find a new game I didn't know about.

rhizome 13y ago

just when designers had begun to catch on to the fact that numbered pagination links need to be big enough to click easily You may have dreamed this part.

throwaway420 13y ago

You're right about what you said, but web designers and developers aren't usually to blame for this. The problem isn't cultural traction among web designers and developers, but among the CEOs and marketing guys and VPs who, for egotistical or political reasons, order the designers to implement the site in a certain way. They love carousels because, as you said, carousels feel like a design cheat code that let you fit 5 (or more) times the amount of content in the same amount of space. Instead of actually researching your niche and making a choice about what content is most important to solve your customers' problems and your own goals and what content gets priority on a page, they take the lazy way out and order the designer to fit everything on the screen. Most decent web developers who place a premium on UX will not usually suggest a carousel as the best way to display some content on the screen, and they may fight those decisions as best as they can, but at the end of the day the people who pay the bills will make these decisions.

mathattack 13y ago
It's very much the fight of simplicity versus committee-think.