Is a carousel bad here

Question

I have a carousel with three quotes, it looks fancy but some one informed me that carousel are unnecessary eye candy.

would it better if i put the quotes next to each other 1 | 2 | 3 | ?

Answer 1

Upsides of carousels:

• Variety of content, even automatic refreshing — adds some zest to the experience

• Condenses space -- get 2x, 3x, or as much content into the same space as you want

Downsides of carousels:

• Unpleasant surprise factor when it switches (it often feels random even if it's timed)

• What I want to look at is invisible (n-1/n)% of the time where n represents how many slides there are

We want to minimize the downsides and amplify the upsides.

Therefore, some tips:

• Don't put much on one slide, especially not text.

• Avoid putting semantically important material in a carousel. Otherwise you are hiding important stuff. Also, depending on how the carousel is implemented behind the scenes, it can be hidden even from screen readers and SEO. So ideally pick or write a library that just hides it, not removes it. (You can still lazy load unimportant stuff, though.)

• Generally, text will be worse than images. People read at different speeds and it switches away from them. Nor does it provide much visual interest, and it's hard to find the slide you want because they all look the same. Whereas an image provides a lot of visual interest and easily recognizable when flipping through them for the one I want.

• Nevertheless, interchangeable text can be OK. That is, if no slide affects any other slide — it doesn't matter what order you read them in, whether you read all of them, or whether you read any of them. Hence you often see it for things like customer testimonials.

• Make navigation easy and obvious so that if I end up where I don't want to be, I can get back.

• Have good logic around automatic switching: e.g., if I manually switch slides, reset the timer, so I don't click and instantly get switched back to a different one if I click at the wrong time. Also, ideally have a pause button.

Long story short, it's hard to do good carousels, but a good rule of thumb is: assume they're glitter; don't make reading/looking at them a requirement.

Answer 2

It depends if you want it to be fancy. From a user experience standpoint ask yourself what's the real aim of this section. Is it to amaze or is it to inform? For the latest I can predict, without conducting expensive A/B tests, that the carousel is no good.