Does this title make you skeptical? I would have been too before I saw the research that led to this article. Ask anyone and they’ll tell you that carousels are an anti-pattern. Don’t use them. But maybe it’s not so cut and dry.
Using real data, this article aims for a better understanding of the current argument against carousels and whether they really deserve the reputation they’ve gained. I’ll break down the arguments point by point and see if our data lines up with those expectations. Through all of that, I’ll detail our findings and methods and make some recommendations on how and when you should use carousels in future.
At Eyecatchy Designs, we develop large-scale e-commerce websites for mobile devices. A lot of the time, those websites have at least one carousel on them. Are we doing something wrong? Are we doing our users a disservice? Could our websites be even better if we stopped using carousels? These were all questions our client and specially our blog readers and I asked each other as we looked through the websites we develop. Instead of being reactionary and following these recommendations to a tee, I decided to do our own research.
So, we started looking at the data available to us. At first we were just curious — what does our data show? What we found surprised us enough to encourage us to keep looking. We examined several mid-sized to large e-commerce websites over a period of 11 months. When I say mid-sized to large, I’m talking about websites that do at least $20 million in e-commerce sales per year. During this 11-month period, we sampled approximately 7.5 million carousel interaction events. The conclusions drawn through the rest of this article are based on that data.
Why We Use Carousels
Carousels are much more than a method of displaying marketing information on a home page. Because we focus on designing for mobile, one of our biggest concerns is making sure that we’re balancing information density with the limitations of small screens. That means making sure we’re always making the best possible use of horizontal and vertical real estate. We use carousels to maximize that information density and maintain context without forcing the user to scroll further down the page.
Context is integral for carousels. Our design team avoids carousels that don’t provide context to the user. For the most part, we only use carousels in one place on our websites: as an image gallery on product detail pages. On a product detail page, a user knows that swiping through the carousel will give them more product images. On a home page marketing carousel, the user has little idea of what the next slide will show or why they should care.
The Case Against Carousels
The current argument against carousels centers on a few points:
1. People don’t interact with carousels.
2. If people interact with carousels, they interact only with the first slide.
3. Carousels aren’t accessible.
4. Automatic advancement of carousel items is bad for users.
I’ll tackle the first two of these points by comparing the data presented in Eyecatchy Designs article with the data we found. The last two points are a little more qualitative, so I’ll just address those on their own.
Hypothesis 1: People Don’t Interact With Carousels
Argument
The argument here usually centers on the data provided by online survey from online user’s. This data shows that only 1.07% of visitors clicked on slides in the featured marketing banner carousel. Viewing a slide was not enough to count as an interaction. Users had to click directly on a slide to be counted.
To dispute the hypothesis, the data would have to show that people interact with carousels at a much higher rate than 1.07%.
Our Results
People interact with product image gallery carousels at a high rate: 72% of users advance the carousel at least once; 23% of users directly interact with the carousel by zooming.
If you look at our unique interaction data — specifically, for the closest comparison, zoom interactions — you can see that 23% of users interacted with the carousel by directly tapping on it for more information. If you consider advancing the carousel in any way to be an interaction, then that data goes up to 72% of total users who interacted with the carousel.
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Note: For a complete breakdown of how we arrived at these results, please fill the form “Contact us”.