Carousel - To have or not to have images on slides

Question

As a developer I'm involved on a discussion about Carousels. We have a CMS backoffice where the user can activate a carousel for his/her site. The main point is wether or not is needed to make optional the image for each slide. The main idea is not to make required any of the three main elements (Image, text, and CTA).

It doesn´t make sense for me not to have images on the carousel slides, because the image depict the main idea of the slide, the text gives a brief intro, and hopefully says "hi, there is more content to read", and the CTA gives a clear sense that it´s clickable (Even when the main slide can be a link). Even more if you´re selling something, the image is the MAIN point of interest.

I´ve read that carousels are not effective, that if you can a static hero image will be better, I've also read the main guidelines for designing effective carousels, but I couldn´t find anything related to don´t have images on slides.

Does it make sense to have carousel slides with no images? There is some guideline for it?

Answer 1

In the ideal world, all of your carousel slides would have high-quality, contextually relevant images to go with their textual descriptions and calls-to-action. In reality, most organizations cannot afford to produce such high-quality assets for all of their features and resort either to stock images, downloading images from Google images, or sub-par quality images, all of which detract from the overall intended experience.

I recommend allowing content creators to add slides to the carousel that don't require an image, but to ease design and development issues produce one or a small set of default fallback slides that can be used in the absence of a proper image. Possible solutions are:

1. using a simple, perhaps textured slide with organizational branding or other relevant messaging on it; or
2. if the "type" of content that's being linked to is structured well enough, let authors select the type of content the slide links to, which then renders a type-specific fallback (i.e. a default slide image for reviews, a slide for press releases, etc.)

Answer 2

If the carousel is intended to showcase products, a user will need to use images, but to show, for example: customer reviews or services, an image may not be required to supplement the text.