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In today's world, we have carousels everywhere. From file type carousels to go from image to image, to things like ads to display multiple ads, you name it.

My question is, what do you think about a carousel that can go across multiple types of data at once. And I'm NOT talking about images/videos/audio as the types. I'm referring to carousels across images/video/audio and comments and topic posts and ads all at once. Perhaps we keep it to two of the above, but note that they are inherently different.

The use case of such a carousel is to discern to the user that a new group of data is coming up, almost like a divider. So as an example, you would be moving from image to image and then suddenly you would see a reddit post and that tells you that the next images are about this post, and this process repeats for some set of posts and images.

What do you think from a user experience perspective? Does it seem intuitive enough? Is carouseling across such different types of information confusing?

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  • you can see only a few items at a time, and are one dimensional. They are not very user friendly, they are just flashy
    – CobaltHex
    Commented May 3, 2017 at 0:31
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    I guess it's not about the questions whether it "seems intuitive enough" to us UX folks, but rather to the potential users. Create a prototype and test it with real people, I'd say. The idea is different enough to validate before you apply it.
    – virtualnobi
    Commented May 3, 2017 at 5:54
  • Regardless of the media type, you'll still have to deal with the fact that people don't usually sit there and watch carousels go around. Your first slide will be seen, maybe the second will, and views will drop off like crazy after that.
    – Ken Mohnkern
    Commented May 3, 2017 at 11:54

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Colouring the background differently for different types of content (and possibly using patterns and gradients for further differentiation if you think you're going to run out of sufficiently differentiated colours) may well help with this kind of "deep" carousel.

I don't perceive any great usability problems IF you can sufficiently "tree" the dives into depths, as per your example of images within a reddit thread. It's that depth that's going to be the barrier to navigation once a user gets engaged in the carousel.

If you have programmers skilled in Core Animation (or a similarly pertinent visaul API/Framework for whatever platform you're using), there's no reason a great UI/UX couldn't be achieved that took (excuse the pun) carousel-ing of content to a whole new level.

And it could be enormously fun to operate, just like the very first iPad twitter app, from Apple, was a revelation in swiping and depth navigation, you could add a degree of Minority Report style physicality to the navigation. Get it right, and you'll have made something many people will enjoy, and enjoy sharing their experiences with.

And yes, it could be very intuitive. Wonderful, in fact.

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People tend to scan the content rather than read, so if you want the carousel works like that you mentioned above, would be so annoying for the user if s/he meet a content which s/he doesn't like and must "next" to see all of them till found the next image/topic.

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