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Comment by geddy | Hacker News Reader

Clever move to make the slide transition timeout juuust a tad too fast to read, further driving home the point that carousels are a shit way to present information.

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From the source:

  auto: {
      enabled: true,
      interval: 3000
      // HA HA! I HATE MY USERS!!! Especially the ones that aren't speed readers.
  }

Top-notch trolling, 10/10 haha

But yeah, carousels moving too fast is almost always an issue when I actually want to read the contents. It's one of those design patterns that just makes me want to close the website.

I felt that detracted from the argument since it was really just demonstrating that a badly implemented carousel is bad - which isn't a strong argument against a well designed carousel.

I don’t think there’s such a thing as a well-implemented carousel. Maybe in theory you could have one, if browsers could do eye-tracking, such that you could stop the carousel’s rotation as soon as the user looks at it.

But without that, users are always going to land their eyes on the carousel and start reading an item in it some random interval after the carousel’s rotation timer last fired. (As, remember, users like to look away from the browser while pages load, and it takes them a random amount of time to look back.) Then, with this random "misalignment" of engagement times, the carousel content will inevitably transition out from under them.

IMHO, this is exactly why users choose to not engage with content in carousels (according to the studies the author cited.) They know they’re going to not get to fully read whatever it is the carousel currently says; and they don’t know for sure how to stop the carousel from progressing; so they don’t bother with it.

If there's no such thing as a well-implemented carousel, then the demonstration shouldn't have needed to use an obviously nerf'd carousel.

Its easiest to point out an issue by first pushing it to the extreme, and then re-evaluating whether the middle-ground does not exhibit the flaw (in lighter fashion)

Every time I do UI stuff, I tell my boss that timers are a code smell.

They're either too long, and the user gets bored or confused, or they're too short and the program bucks the user off and runs on without them.

"Skip" buttons don't work. If you can have a Skip button, just make it a Next button and kill the timer.

I mostly agree with this. I've seen one valid and helpful usage of timers though: in Waze. Some things start automatically after some time, like navigation after selecting and address, or dismissing a notification. The time remaining is indicated on the corresponding button itself in a progress bar fashion.

i would absolutely HATE if navigation started itself after i selected the address after some time.

I'm forgetful when it comes to short term memory, and it would annoy me deeply.

It's surely better than Google's Maps approach. They make Maps crash while you're driving on the freeway, so you say "Okay Google, start directions home" and it says "Would you like me to start directions home? We know you're driving at bone crushing speeds on a road you've never been on in a country you're not entirely familiar with. Just look at your phone screen and find the button and crash into the side of the freeway and don't get home. It's not like you need to keep your attention on the road while driving; we are quite happy if you crash and die. But timers and explicit audio instructions are just such poor usability."

If you tell it to _navigate_ home it will actually pull up the directions and the go button will have a autostart timer so you don't touch anything. Ask for directions and you will have to start touching the screen.

Timers can be useful, for example ensuring a slight (500ms) delay when a user expects an interaction to be non-instant (like saving or transmitting data). I wrote about this case here: https://medium.com/@graycoding/detect-slow-and-fast-asynchro...

It's not an axiom. We can see plenty of successful realizations of carousell pattern for touch screens. Most famous is Instagram stories

Are those carousels? I can’t easily go back to the beginning after watching a user stories. A carousel automatically does this.

I'm not sure if that was a design decision or just a natural artifact of using a carousel. They have a natural uncanny ability to rotate precisely when you don't want them to.

I find it weirdly infuriating. It feels like the whatever I just tried to focus on is being pulled away by someone being annoying.

That, in combination with the inevitable gimme-your-email and some other gate between me and whatever I tried to view is usually enough to make me leave the site and wish I could tag sites in my browser as "do not activate links to".

That's a great idea for an extension.

And clicking the next button just before the timeout makes it skip the 2nd slide.

Too slow is also a thing. They always seem to scroll the second you try to click on them. There's a neuroscience phenomenon whereby the mind fills in for the motion of the eyes, I forget what it's called but it was on HN a little while ago about how crazy the human brain really is.

Agree, it took me a second to realize what he was doing, then I did smile. Well played.

Does that drive the point home or undermine it?

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