[h2s]

I've been waiting and hoping for the anti-carousel movement to gain cultural traction among web developers for some time. The fact that this page has made it to the front page of HN gives me hope that momentum will begin to increase more rapidly now.

Some people seem to think carousels are some sort of design cheat code, making it possible to include five pieces of content in the space of one. It's almost the front-end equivalent of a TODO comment.

    // TODO: decide which of these things actually matters.
    // In the meantime, let's just show all five one-by-one

They don't even work for images. When a person wants to browse a collection of images, they'll want to choose when to skip to the next image themselves. That's why Facebook's image albums don't automatically move to the next image after five seconds.

And those fucking carousel pagination "dots"... just when designers had begun to catch on to the fact that numbered pagination links need to be big enough to click easily, along came carousels to preserve the tradition of impossibly small UI elements that are difficult to interact with.

Fuck carousels.

[at-fates-hands]

I would also add the inconsistency in how they are coded. Some allow pausing on the slide, others do not. Sometimes you can click the pagination buttons to get to the next slide, sometimes you can't. Some have arrows for moving to the next slide, some won't have pagination, and others are just a timed slide show - which is by far the worst.

It's a user's nightmare anytime you're presented with a carousels since you never know what functionality, if any you're going to get. I'm thinking this is why so many people simply discard them entirely now.

They've become the most useless web dressing ever.

[baddox]

I love the ones that advance slides on a timer regardless of user clicks, so you can manually advance from slide 1 to slide 2 and the timer will kick in 100ms later, advancing you to slide 3.

[sbarre]

that's just bad code though..

[baddox]

All code that outputs a bad user experience is bad code.

[rjuyal]

hahaha

[throwaway420]

You're right about what you said, but web designers and developers aren't usually to blame for this.

The problem isn't cultural traction among web designers and developers, but among the CEOs and marketing guys and VPs who, for egotistical or political reasons, order the designers to implement the site in a certain way.

They love carousels because, as you said, carousels feel like a design cheat code that let you fit 5 (or more) times the amount of content in the same amount of space. Instead of actually researching your niche and making a choice about what content is most important to solve your customers' problems and your own goals and what content gets priority on a page, they take the lazy way out and order the designer to fit everything on the screen.

Most decent web developers who place a premium on UX will not usually suggest a carousel as the best way to display some content on the screen, and they may fight those decisions as best as they can, but at the end of the day the people who pay the bills will make these decisions.

[mathattack]

It's very much the fight of simplicity versus committee-think.

[enraged_camel]

>>That's why Facebook's image albums don't automatically move to the next image after five seconds.

Well, now that you opened your big mouth... :)

Aside from showing upper management that their latest bullshit idea is on the website, carousels also serve another purpose, which is to make the website look "alive" and "dynamic" and "interactive." And that's just the tip of the buzzword iceberg.

Ultimately it is one of the many symptoms of a very common phenomenon: design decisions made by people who don't know anything about design. In most cases these people are directors and C-level executives.

[lifeformed]

What you guys think about my carousel implementation? IMO, it is done tastefully. I made this site for a friend of mine: http://indieviddy.com/

It's just an aesthetic presentation of non-essential content (random portfolio items).

[laumars]

Looks pretty, but there's no (obvious) way to control it (so when items drop off you can't get them back - that is, until they eventually loop back around again).

There's a couple of other issues with your site as well - it seems fixed to a very wide width (possibly due to the carousel?) which is not only quite significantly wider than many laptop displays / non-maximized browsers would reach. And you seem to have some character encoding issues as you're apostrophes are being replaced with �.

On a personal note, some of the fonts are too big as well. Your site reads more comfortable when I've zoomed out twice (which also fixes the width issue as well).

Aside that, the landing page looks well polished enough (I didn't venture further in).

    Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:22.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/22.0

[lifeformed]

Thanks for the feedback. The portfolio wasn't meant to be solely accessed through the carousel - there's a dedicated page for it, and the carousel was just a "look at all these things I've worked on" statement. I guess I didn't clearly communicate that. You aren't really meant to navigate it, rather just to look at it's breadth and click on one if it caught you eye.

The width is indeed because of the carousel - I meant for it to go of the page. Is that causing weird scrolling problems? It's supposed to be overflow-x: hidden. Is that causing weird tablet scrolling issues? You're not supposed to be able to scroll horizontally.

I'll have to look into the character encoding issue - thanks for that report.

[laumars]

> Thanks for the feedback. The portfolio wasn't meant to be solely accessed through the carousel - there's a dedicated page for it, and the carousel was just a "look at all these things I've worked on" statement. I guess I didn't clearly communicate that. You aren't really meant to navigate it, rather just to look at it's breadth and click on one if it caught you eye.

I realised that was more a showcase than for navigation. What I meant was that if one did catch your eye just as it was falling off the page - you can't bring it back. It can be argued as a pretty miner issue I'll grant you. But that was my immediate thought when I saw stuff drop off the side :)

> The width is indeed because of the carousel - I meant for it to go of the page. Is that causing weird scrolling problems? It's supposed to be overflow-x: hidden. Is that causing weird tablet scrolling issues? You're not supposed to be able to scroll horizontally.

This is was in Firefox on ArchLinux (laptop). I definitely have a scrollbar at the bottom. Sorry mate :(

> I'll have to look into the character encoding issue - thanks for that report.

I notice you don't have any meta tags for encodings. I wonder if that might be causing the issue (I should stress - I'm not an expert on these matters): http://www.w3.org/TR/html5-diff/#character-encoding

[goostavos]

It looks really pretty. However, it frustrates me the same way that using Netflix's UI does. The scroll speed on the carousel is crazy slow! I'm not going to sit for 45 seconds waiting to see what else is in the carousel and if it's interesting enough to warrant me clicking on it.

Not sure if that's the feedback you were looking for, but there it is ;) As I said, I do dig the overall aesthetics of the site.

[lifeformed]

Dang. It wasn't meant to be a thing that you navigate through - it was just a little preview of the actual portfolio page. I guess I didn't communicate that clearly. Thanks for the feedback.

[hmsimha]

I just thought I'd chime in that I thought the carousel looked good and it was pretty apparent that it was just a grab-your-attention thing, but that the content was further down the page. Other than the issue of screen scrolling horizontally (I also had a vertical strip of whitespace fixed to the left of the page) it looks pretty good

[tankbot]

I think this is actually a pretty good use of a carousel. It's nice looking, and like you said >It's just an aesthetic presentation of non-essential content (random portfolio items).

The only thing I would add is a way for the user to interact with the carousel if they needed to. Most people will ignore it, but if a game does catch someone's eye, it's currently impossible to scroll backwards to check it out.

[h2s]

I think I can best express what I think of it in code.

     <marquee onmouseover="this.setAttribute('scrollamount', 0, 0);" onmouseout="this.setAttribute('scrollamount', 6, 0);">

It's certainly a nice implementation of what it's supposed to be an implementation of. But it's effectively just a resurrection of the <marquee> tag.

[nollidge]

Not a fan. If the user wished to interact with it, you can't advance/rewind slides manually, so it's annoying. If the user doesn't wish to interact with it, it's still moving and distracting and wasting space, so it's still annoying.

[roc]

The carousel isn't 'loud', but it's still being ignored. And as someone actually uses the page, it's quickly scrolled off the page.

I think he might have been better served by putting those portfolio items in the sidebars.

[lifeformed]

That's okay, it wasn't meant to be the focus of the page - just a little banner of imagery. I guess it would've made more sense if it wasn't clickable and didn't move. The clickable content is meant to be primarily navigated on the Portfolio page.

[flyingyeti]

It's an interesting take, but is still extremely frustrating to interact with. I would like to navigate through the images at my own pace and click forward/back exploring content, which the carousel prevents me from doing. It's also not obvious to me where I can find the same content in a different format- it looks like mostly they're taken from the portfolio section but I didn't know that until I drilled around the site for a while. I'd at least include a "view all" link below the carousel.

[lifeformed]

> It's also not obvious to me where I can find the same content in a different format- it looks like mostly they're taken from the portfolio section but I didn't know that until I drilled around the site for a while.

I guess that's the main problem. It wasn't meant to be a navigable thing, just a preview of the portfolio content. I figured once someone clicked on one of them, they would see the other games. I think maybe it looks more important than it's meant to be. It was just a little graphical banner that became fancy.

[SkyMarshal]

Not a site critique, but nice business idea. Posted it /r/gamedev subreddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1i1amy/marketing_fo...

[nobodysfool]

Animation is kinda janky on Chrome 28... mystery meat navigation, seems like I'm interacting with a train (slowdown on hover, speed up on hover out). Yeah, you're better off without it.

[jd]

With the exception of image gallery carousels for mobile devices. Those can work great.

[lysol]

They do, except when it's a desktop-targeted image carousel with no support for touch events other than simple presses.

[devils_advocate]

I like carousels when they're used for the right purposes ... it's my favorite way to view a slide-show (so long as I can control how it advances). On the other hand, I can't think of any other valid reason to use one.

[AUmrysh]

The only place I've seen appropriate use of a carousel is on game review websites where they're showing the latest news/reviews/whatever. Those seem to work pretty well, although I rarely use them to navigate, sometimes an interesting image or piece of text will pop up on it and I'll find a new game I didn't know about.

[rhizome]

just when designers had begun to catch on to the fact that numbered pagination links need to be big enough to click easily

You may have dreamed this part.

[bierko]

Since you mention the dots, I wonder if carousels gained traction after smartphones (i.e. the paging dots on the iOS home screen).

[phillmv]

I don't think so. Back in 2009 I was responsible for adding another carousel monstrosity to the world and that was just before smartphones exploded. Certainly not what I had in mind.

[jaequery]

op's page ironically made the carousel useful

[mark-r]

Really? You must be a speed reader. The first couple of images seemed to stick around forever, but there wasn't nearly enough time to read the denser ones. It also makes a difference that it was the entire content of the page, so there were no distractions. That will never be the case on a real page.

[coherentpony]

Just FYI, I loved reading this comment.