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Comment by gitgud | Hacker News Reader

It's the classic false economy you're saving vertical space, but nobody wants to scroll your carousels, or wait for it to transition. It's always easier to just scroll down the page, especially on mobile.

Apps like Instagram have a standard carousel for photo albums and people use them and can trust the functionality.

But most websites have varying implementations of carousels, with weird functionality (autoplay, transitions, no-swipe, randomized). Users get confused by each implementation and eventually just ignore them...

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I would posit that the only good use for carousels is with images. Craigslist is a good example of this with the thumbnails below the carousel. Its very natural with images, like flipping through a picture book. This way you can keep the relevant text in view while you look at all the pictures in the album.

"Apps like Instagram have a standard carousel for photo albums"

Yeah, but that only applies to users who are used to Instagram. It's definitely not an INTUITIVE feature.

I've had friends and family link me to Instagram posts, and though I've learned now, for a long time they'd have to explicitly mention there were additional pictures in the post, or I'd miss them.

(I don't know if it's different in the app, but certainly in the webpage those little dots at the bottom are non-obvious to a first-time user.)

True but that's just the first time experience, once they understand it, then user's will trust that the scrolling function will work on subsequent sessions.

With websites, every implementation is slightly different... so user's get that confusing "first time experience" every single new website they visit...

I think it's more of a mobile-first design. It would be super weird to see it and do it with a mouse, but it's a common enough ui on mobile apps that I think a lot of people will be accustomed to it. But Instagram also has a feature where the second time you see a post that you haven't scrolled through, you see the second photo. This might server as a discoverability aid.

It is 153% the case that mobile user experience is almost entirely happened during the epoch when helping your user understand how to use the app rates second, and keeping some hidden features for expert users rates highly (the feeling of being a power user since you know some features others don't - making the user feel a little bit loyal to your app).

So if it's not perfectly discoverable, that's probable something the designers are happy with.

The best part is when carousels show up on game consoles or kiosks when you're trying to log in or something that makes what you're trying to do impossible.

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