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Suppose say, in my mobile app, I want to display a list of related recommended products while the user is viewing the main product (e.g. like the way Amazon shows a list of recommended books based on the book users are already viewing).
Is it a good idea to use a Carousel control to display them? Carousel control is at the bottom. See this:
download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups
Summary: Carousel control has some drawbacks on mobile. More straightforward solution could work better. Still, A/B test is the best way to evaluate the idea.
Some consideration on using carousel control:
Interaction style
People interact with a mobile in a specific way. You can find some insights in the How Do Users Really Hold Mobile Devices? article. See the picture and think of carousel interaction in the bottom of the screen:
From the How Do Users Really Hold Mobile Devices? by Steven Hoober
Content
You probably want people to interact with carousel. Then you need to have engaging content, so they see it and react on it. The problems with carousel are:
• Some content is invisible, so there is zero engagement
• Visible content is too small (low details/quality) to be engaging for users
• Carousel interaction could be non obvious caused by the low affordance
• Carousel affordances could be hidden by the palm
You can try different approach to fix these:
Design with the real data and know your users
Use the real data to see how the content will look like. What does engage users? Is it visible in your control?
Consider different solutions
Try different solutions, which are more cheep and obvious:
Conduct A/B testing
It's the most valuable method to test the solution. And it's easy these days.
It is a good idea given that a product image alone is sufficient for the user to follow your recommendations. It'll work for cloths but might not be effective for hardware. The latter example will require adding some detail. And the presented design will struggle if you have anything more than a line of extra text below each image.
Assuming that image alone is sufficient, your design is actually very good: you place recommendations at the bottom, you avoid dots for navigation and use left and right arrows (apart from automatically rotating recommendations). Usability studies demonstrate that this more explicit navigation aids are more effective: read here.
