If we had a dollar for every time we were asked to add a carousel to a webpage, we’d have enough money to enjoy a fancy dinner on Collins Street.
A carousel is a module on a page that allows dynamic content to be on display. Like the name suggests, information can be placed on auto-rotate to display new information every 5 seconds. The feature is often used by creative professionals or e-commerce companies.
Unfortunately, studies have shown that the effectiveness of carousels is limited. It can also impact the usability of your page.
Why don’t they work?
People interact with webpages very quickly. If you have a four image carousel that shows each image for 5 seconds you can’t expect that a user will stay at the top of the page for 20 seconds. Therefore, housing key information in a carousel creates the possibility that your content may not be seen by your audience.
What is banner blindness?
A huge flickering banner should draw attention, yes? Not always. Think of when you visit your favourite websites or news sites. A lot of sites have banners, but thanks to our very own built in ‘banner blindness’ our brain has trained itself to ignore the bright flashy things that are trying to distract us from the purpose of our visit to the page.
There is a tendency for users to ignore page elements which they perceive to be ads or irrelevant. As a user scans for what they are looking for, they ignore information presented in your carousel.
SEO
Carousels conflict and create problems with SEO. SEO issues may affect the use of headings, flash, page load speed.
Search engines crawl for page headings. When headings are associated with a carousel, the information will change continuously, confusing the search engine.
Search engines may not be able to read information in flash content. Limiting the value of this information.
Search engines love fast pages. And carousels add extra elements to your page. Carousels may slow your page loading speed losing you SEO rankings.
Mobile
The rise of mobile has made carousels tricky to operate, impacting user experience. Carousels that use flash are not optimised for mobile screens. Issues may include content too big for the screen or the display of a broken web page. Furthermore, most carousels have limited touch functionality and responsiveness. A carousel may slow page load times on devices with limited connections such as 3G.
What to use instead
Quality static images with good content. This will help page load times, providing better usability and flow for the user.
Consider this-
- A user visits your site and their focus immediately directs to the carousel.
- It takes 5 seconds for the flash enabled carousel to appear.
- As the user scans your carousel, the opening information may not be what they are looking for. They will consider if they are in the right place.
- If the user does stay on the page, they may click through the available information. They will need to find out how to use the carousel.
- If you are lucky, the user may wait to see information filter through.
- But as the user is about to click on the content. The information changes.
- Should it be this hard to for a user to find what they are looking for?
Not convinced? Visit: Should I Use A Carousel
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