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psychometry

I honestly can't think of an instance where a carousel is the best UI element to use, yet everyone requests them. Why?

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Internal Department Head You Can't Say No To: "We need our campaign on the front page next month."

Website Manager: "Okay, we'll put you in the carousel."

Not enough upvotes in the world.

They're an absolute boon to Web designers where different stakeholders in the client organisation can't make up their bloody minds. There comes a snapping point where a carousel is suggested to avoid insanity.

Indeed. It's an organizational relief valve that doesn't rock the boat much from a UI or product perspective. This is less of a problem at a small company, but a big problem at large companies. Standardizing the creative unit also makes it much easier to manage, and can be changed quickly by a semi-technical person if they are given a tool.

Clients/bosses love them and to them they ARE the best UI element to use. I've had this discussion with hundreds of clients and they just won't budge -- they want a carousel, make it so.

They are the "best" for the people or companies featured in the carousel, NOT the users of the carousels.

Photographers displaying pictures that don't want to lose vertical space is clearly one.

In our website we use it for instructional photo succession, I think it works pretty good, I'm open to suggestions (other than videos) to other UI elements that would work better for that that purpose.

http://getfinn.com/#instructions

I have never seen your product before, and those four images give me a very clear sense of how it works. I would much rather click through a series of images like this than play a video, even if the video is short.

Good to hear! Thanks for the feedback. I've had to fight against carousels several times, since they sometimes want to be used as a way to save space and fit more information, that's clearly bad UI but I certainly think that there are several cases in which they have their place.

Because UI concerns don't always (or even usually) drive requirements.

I think it's safe to say they're pretty useful for artists and photographers to show collections of their work.

I think a page of thumbnails or the images themselves is still better.

I have a carousel on my product page and I treat it like an image. I think it works pretty well. When someone clicks on it, I'll show the next image and people actually click through to browse the other images.

http://www.wellingtonstravel.com

I built mine myself but the slick carousel looks pretty good!

edgecase

Any collection of work for that matter, such as product page that has multiple images.

I use them on my site for each product's outfits, because it was the only way to always see the outfits next to the original products rather than scrolling down and seeing the outfits out of context. I can't think of a better way to achieve this, what do you think? whatgoestiththis.co is the site and click on any product to see.

Because handling internal politics at BigCos can be very difficult. Also, for many departments, the way they are judged on success can differ from other departments doing similar activities.

If you want to see a really horrible example of that kind of politics getting in the way of customers and users - SearsCo

Exactly. The carousels on The Verge and Polygon are just awful. The only good implementation of a carousel on mobile (in my experience) is the one on GSMArena, which has large prev/next buttons.

I actually like the carousel on the mobile app if that's what you're talking about. I know it's the top stories, but yeah it hides the other stories if you didn't know about swiping.

It could be that the swipe is more reliable in the app, but on the mobile website, it's not. Sometimes my swipe is ignored and sometimes I even accidentally activate the link of the current item in the carousel. #annoying

It's an easy way to display multiple photographs in a gallery/portfolio. They can be used for the main images or thumbnails.

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I've been designing UIs as a web developer for about 15 years, for many years exclusively in ecommerce, and in every test I've done a product carousel performs worse than a product grid. Users prefer to see all the recommendations at once. Every single time I've seen one implemented it's been a result of a design decision (avoiding long scrolling pages usually) rather than a data-driven UX decision.

what about this one : https://www.joingrouper.com/

How about text ads?

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