Should I Use a Carousel? (2013)

76•coffeecoders•4h ago

Comments

burnhamup•4h ago

Point taken. It was really annoying to try to read one of the slides of the carousel because it kept moving.

EvanAnderson•3h ago

I found it very readable w/ my default Javascript-diasbled configuration. It wasn't until I viewed the page w/o my plugins loaded that I got the message.

9d•3h ago

People who are going to disable JavaScript, are going to disable JavaScript.

People who won't, wont.

Neither camp needs to proselytize the other, nor is it ever very effective.

And bragging about which side you're on is weird.

kelnos•3h ago

"I disable JS" always felt to me like the "I don't own a TV" elitism-brag.

9d•2h ago

To be fair, if you're going to just be a genuinely superior person than other people are, you might as well just brag about that superiority since there's nothing else it's useful for.

mdaniel•2h ago

I guess the rest of the sentence is "... if TVs were a fundamental pre-requisite for modern life"

> Yeah, bro, I rub two sticks together to cook my own deer meet, because Big Grocery is tracking me

wredcoll•1h ago

That's an amusing reference, been a while since I've seen one, I assume because computer screens make tvs pointless.

I wonder if there's a more current version? Not having a smartphone perhaps?

9d•1h ago

2005: I don't have a TV

2015: I don't have a smartphone

2020: I don't have social media

2025: I don't have friends

davidkellis•3h ago

How many other user interactions are generally considered objectively bad practice? Sure, there may be a time and place, but what is frequently overused?

Toasts:

- https://maxschmitt.me/posts/toasts-bad-ux

- https://youtu.be/LeCKu0HqGFQ?si=xKApVFSqdzLGF0SD

Modals (being a special case of modes):

- https://modalzmodalzmodalz.com/

Modes:

- https://www.nngroup.com/articles/modes/

- https://ilyabirman.net/meanwhile/all/timed-modes/

What else?

lurk2•3h ago

>What else?

Being anything other than a static page where I get your company’s phone number to call and talk to someone whose first language is my own.

stirfish•3h ago

>talk to someone

kelnos•3h ago

If a website interaction has to lead me to a phone call in order to get something useful done, that website has completely failed.

Ideally I never want to have to pick up my phone at all. Customer support is an exception to that, but only as a last resort: if it gets to the point that I have to call a business, something has gone very very wrong.

econ•1h ago

Haha, customers want to aks unreasonable or insane questions, replace a good process with a bad one and tell you their life story. They might even need to talk with a normal person about normal things. Refusal might be expensive. If you can bring an insane request within the boundaries of possibility they can't help but appreciate it.

bryanrasmussen•1h ago

I believe you two are in agreement, they go to the website to get a phone number to call the company to talk about something that needs human interaction, they cannot get any phone number at all some times, or they can only get one with a bot that says I don't understand a lot - as a consequence "that website has completely failed"

> Customer support is an exception to that, but only as a last resort: if it gets to the point that I have to call a business, something has gone very very wrong.

It is a common thing that people say - hmm, this is a complicated situation and a human needs to be talked to (probably these people don't understand how impressive AI is) and modern UX as a cost saving measure absolutely fails a customers need to talk to a human at the company they are getting a service from.

lazyasciiart•3h ago

So, you just want the phone book. Yellowpages.com should do it?

harimau777•20m ago

I would love if we returned to a day when I could find a company's phone number as easily as just looking it up in a phone book.

lurk2•3m ago

Yes, this would be a vast improvement. Most companies don’t even take inbound calls anymore, though.

mynegation•3h ago

Marquee was so bad that the whole tag got deprecated (I am probably dating myself).

9d•3h ago

I remember marquees! Wasn't it \<m> or something?

Man I wish I could find the first HTML book I ever read. Must have read it in 1994 or something. It used "Mosaic" browser, which looked nothing like the IE3 or IE4 that I had. Wow, this brings back so many memories.

If anyone can ever find that book on Amazon, please let me know! I've been looking for years.

mdaniel•2h ago

MDN's got your back: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

I recognize this might not help you, but my first one was one of those huge Unleashed books "HTML and CGI" <https://books.google.com/books/about/HTML_and_CGI_unleashed....> which it seems one can still buy for $5

My first real web job out of collage was introducing HTX/IDX[1] to a shop that was still using Visual C++ to make CGI because C++ was the only hammer they had in their toolbox :sob:

1: I'm actually shocked that they still serve documentation for it https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/iis/6.0-...

ghssds•1h ago

Don't forget <blink>

ldoughty•3h ago

Not positive, but I think our product added toasts to comply with ADA/VPAT requirements on confirming the user got a second page of data in the table that are viewing and clicked "next" for. I think it had to do with having both audio and visual acknowledgement of the action.

Otherwise, we would have to physically page or add dialogues people would have to click to close, just to see page 2 of table data

JimDabell•3h ago

Burger menus. Don’t hide the links you want people to use.

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/hamburger-menus/

Splash screens (fortunately mostly dead on the web, but still in use on mobile).

https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

bloomca•49m ago

Hijacking scroll, icons with no explanation, auto hiding content, not enough contrast between content and background, etc.

nightfly•45m ago

"Mystery meat navigation" has become standard

harimau777•23m ago

Disabling right click. I often want to open up various products in multiple tabs so that I can then go through them and select one to buy. When a website disables right click, I often just give up and don't buy anything.

Similar is having "links" that are actually implemented using an onClick handler so that I can't right click and select "open in new tab". Often this results in me later realizing that I opened the link's image in a new tab rather than the link itself.

BenjiWiebe•3m ago

Does your mouse have a scroll wheel? They always(afaik) can be clicked by pressing down, called a middle click.

Middle clicking links opens them in a new tab, at least in Firefox.

harimau777•17m ago

Infinite scroll. Both because it's frustrating not to know how much content there is and because the lack of pagination often makes finding what you want difficult.

waltbosz•3h ago

I haven't seen carousels lately, seems like the trend has mostly died out.

9d•3h ago

I saw them on websites maybe twice in the past week.

duskwuff•3h ago

Scroll-linked effects are the new carousels.

mdaniel•2h ago

I do not possess enough rage to express at the "let me swoosh in content only at the last possible pixel so that you think there's no more content" pages

cuddlyogre•10m ago

Every one of our client sites have one. It's proving to be a pain, so maybe that will change soon.

ofalkaed•3h ago

Makes me nostalgic for figurative carousels.

tempodox•49m ago

That's what the linked site shows. Did you mean literal carousels?

ofalkaed•34m ago

No, I meant figurative, it is no longer 2013 and we don't party like that any more.

mdaniel•2h ago

I thought for sure this was going to be one of those "isfirefoxfastyet" style sites that was just a <h1>no</h1> but I guess the message is driven further home by hiding the "no" in the 2nd "page" of the carousel

Groxx•58m ago

Sadly it's now part of CSS.

Thanks, Google. https://adrianroselli.com/2025/05/my-request-to-google-on-ac...

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