Can't stand all the websites with "galleries" when searching for lists of things, trying to maximize ad impressions. I click away faster than anything.
Maybe that's intentional. You've now paused to look at something you didnt originally intend to look at, but may pause long enough to read. And who's to say that "click adjacent" slide wasn't intentionally close enough in interest.
Or maybe the intent is just for the subliminal nature. So when you see the same or related images later, you'll pause just a bit longer.
The best is when the timer is not reset after you click next manually.
This page executed flawlessly on this requirement. Bonus points for having one slide with very short text to make me click through and the next slide with very long text.
The author is sarcastic, but "being able to tell people in Marketing/Senior Management that their latest idea is on the Home Page" without interfering with the homepage is a significant business need.
Edit: Travis is a horrible human being during the time of Uber. Maybe he has matured and mellowed out now? However, his stink is still in my mind and has forever tainted Uber for me. I will never use Uber on any of my devices, ever.
Greyball was actually a neutral tool that could also be used for good things. The regional managers of Uber could configure it to meet the needs of their market, so it had a variety of uses.
One example is that it was used to prevent taxi drivers in South American countries from targeting Uber drivers for beatings, car jackings or worse. Regardless of what you think about Uber or the taxi monopoly, it was a good thing to prevent physical harm to drivers on the service.
Even the supposedly bad uses of Greyball are, well, in the grey. Government regulators, often working at the behest of medallion owners (who generally don't drive taxis*), preferred to use fear as a tactic. They would target the drivers with whatever traffic tickets they could find, knowing that it is difficult for these drivers to fight. Greyball made this tactic harder, which forced cities into court directly with Uber, a much fairer matchup.
The really odd thing about greyball, though, is that there's actually no user requirement that the cars in the Uber app be real. They could have just "greyballed" everyone, and use standard anti-fraud practices to prevent someone requesting many trips and never starting them.
* Even where medallion owners are required to be owner-operators, they can often just sit in the taxi queue at the airport doing a crossword for a few hours.
That's some heavy duty spin right there. Anything that you can do to justify what Uber did is glossing over the fact that what they did was just wrong. The ends do not justify the means, and it's a sad problem that it's accepted at this level.
I once had a client’s ceo phone me up in a rage because the website was broken, how totally unprofessional it was etc.
After some confused troubleshooting, I discovered he was looking was printouts of the website he had his secretary make so he could look at it at home.
This one drives me nuts. So many sites abruptly stop doing something I want (scrolling) to do something I don't (resizing a map or other image), so then I have to undo two kinds of designer brain damage instead of just one.
Like all things, I think they can have a purpose. They are pretty good when the content is primarily image based and when the purpose of the content is for design/feel. However, automatically rotating is often questionable unless it rotates extremely slowly and the content is particularly unimportant.
As long as you're fine with the vast majority of people not ever seeing the hidden carousel items, it's perfectly serviceable as an interface pattern. There are contexts where it's quite useful.
Agreed, most of my websites are essentially just pitch decks to check the box of some audience's quest for determining if they should take my seriously.
And so since its not optimizing for engagement, it is purely aesthetic, but aesthetic in the sense that it can have poor features that other serious companies use. A Fortune 500 website would have notoriously shitty aspects, do that if you want audiences that think that is clout.
Fortunately my non-North American and younger North American audiences don't even care about websites. All commerce is driven straight through chat apps. And do I really want the clientele that thinks I need a website that they will accidentally find on a search engine, or by accidentally typing a .com in the address bar by habit? no. I've considered make my fonts smaller and thinner hoping they think thats a problem and bounce, I like the aesthetics of thinner fonts but its more like thinking maybe I can just ignore the issue from the people who are less likely to be able to read it since they're not the target audience anyway.
I'm pretty much never doing things for SEO. Everyone's just going to click through from a chat app, or a twitter feed because someone else was talking about it. Since a lot of people swear by other e-commerce books that never made them a dime and have opposite advice, maybe I should release my own.
That doesn't really represent the experience of how rich the experience in chat apps are.
People get their information from heavily populated channels (one way communication chat rooms run by personalities people like, defacto "influencers"), which are forwarded to people that didn't read it. Permeating many communities and private group chats in minutes.
If it is labor intensive, its only that way for a week or two as you coordinate all of the posts with many channels.
When I read your earlier comment talking about "commerce", I was thinking of ordering a product, which strikes me as a bad fit for chat app unless it's very low volume (and a good fit for a website).
Your bio talks about fintech and digital assets, so perhaps I was imagining the wrong scenarios.
one-off "drops" are high volume and are also completed through apps these days, even instagram's marketplace is conducive to this, an immediate convenience that doesn't wait for people to think "ok thats normal", the commerce just happens. with apple pay integration and similar rails you really don't need a site - even for non-crypto users.
I work at an ad agency and we have to send this link to people on a regular basis.
We actually had a customer once who put 40 (!) carousel slides on the frontpage of his website and wondered why nobody is clicking through to the linked pages.
When someone insists on carousels now, I tell them that it will also hurt website performance and therefore its ranking on Google. This shuts them up 99% percent of the time.
It's amazing just how versatile the word "SEO" is.
It truly is the cause of and solution to all of your website's problems.
Or to view it more cynically, SEO is the Swiss Army knife that can simultaneously excuse away poor performance while justifying additional expenditure.
Its my go to justification for any decision I want these days. I successfully used SEO to get out of vaccination (by becoming magnetized I would be unable to balance the page, you see).
One thing I've noticed is fewer clients want carousels now, but we have had quite a few request a hero image with static content and a dynamic background. They'll add 4 or 5 hero images, and we'll just smoothly transition between them every 4-5 seconds while the text/CTAs remain the same. It seems that what they really want is just some animation and flashy on the page and the only way the average person knows to do that is via a carousel. As far as I'm aware, this style of hero has been much more successful when we've done it.
Hahaha this reminds me of a client that wanted to put his entire portfolio (120+ images including blueprints with text) into a carousel despite my suggestion that he use a gallery. And because he wanted viewers to look at every image he asked me to remove all controls, including pause and previous. So it was essentially a 10 minute JavaScript powered video slideshow. The whole site became so bad on his requests that I could no longer use it toward my portfolio.
The stats can lie. That number is not deterministic for all carousels in all contexts. There are probably contexts where the user interacts and clicks through the carousels often. However, it is hard to get it right.
One way would be to show information sequentially, one piece after the other. Think how regular websites that you scroll down are organized - but also brochures or flyers. Yes, you have to decide on the order and one item will be the first. But you do the same with the carousel anyway. Plus, a regular layout makes it easier to scan for information.
If you must hide some information for whatever reason (to preserve space, to increase user engagement metrics), perhaps tabs would work. They can have useful labels which are better than the navigation dots on the carousel.
Back-to-fundamentals exercise for a recovering carouselist:
1. Write a short summary of every content phase, and initially just straight up list those summaries each linking to details[0].
2. As an improvement, consider if you want the user to click/tap to expand a point without leaving the page. Pay special attention to accessibility, tabindex, aria-describedby et al. as you do that.
3. At certain viewport sizes, you may put details to the side, and highlight the expanded point.
4. Then, as a final step, you could also cycle expanded points until first user input. Respect prefers reduced motion flag.
Voilà, you have a carousel but thought-through, accessible and purposeful.
[0] There is a natural limit on the number of points that can be shown. Make sure to be clear about the purpose of the widget. If a business is attempting to list more than 4–5 points, either there is a problem with focus or there are nearly non-overlapping audiences (e.g., seller/buyer) and resource should correspondingly be split into multiple entry points. These are aspects where design cannot be decoupled from business decisions.
Don’t put text into a carousel. I think it makes sense for images. For example on a hotel page, show the people a few big pictures, even if they don‘t interact with the page.
Bonus annoyance points if the carousel rotates automatically and carousel is not scrollable with keyboard. It's frustrating not having enough time to finish reading the carousel slide.
Aside from that, it's interesting how users expect everything in the frontpage now (Not that i m complaining). They seem to be blind to subpages and expect to find anything with a bit of scrolling. Hiding content behind curtains, like carousels do, is a bad idea.
All of the problems they point out are when using a carousel for navigation or other interactivity. A lot of times they are simply for displaying something flashy and dynamic on the front page without really caring whether a user sees it all or not, and for that they work great.
I've tried pitching this, but my experience is that if a client wants a carousel, just give them what they want. If competitor X has a carousel, or big tech company Y has one, they're going to want a carousel, too. It helps to have analytic data from pre- and post-carousel, though.
The only case I implement carousels on websites is for images which are complementary to the content but not essential or as a hero element, but never absolutely never with changing text.
There ought to be a browser/os settings to disable unprovoked animations and transitions. All information should be readily viewable, and controls shouldn't be moving around
unless you are the one to be moving them, looking at you android notifications..
98 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadOr maybe the intent is just for the subliminal nature. So when you see the same or related images later, you'll pause just a bit longer.
This page executed flawlessly on this requirement. Bonus points for having one slide with very short text to make me click through and the next slide with very long text.
> Greyball was used by ride-hailing company Uber to evade city regulators and deny service to some customers...
What the hell, Uber?
> Uber did not receive any formal punishment or restrictions from the city.
What the hell, government?
[0]https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11173006/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0
Edit: Travis is a horrible human being during the time of Uber. Maybe he has matured and mellowed out now? However, his stink is still in my mind and has forever tainted Uber for me. I will never use Uber on any of my devices, ever.
One example is that it was used to prevent taxi drivers in South American countries from targeting Uber drivers for beatings, car jackings or worse. Regardless of what you think about Uber or the taxi monopoly, it was a good thing to prevent physical harm to drivers on the service.
Even the supposedly bad uses of Greyball are, well, in the grey. Government regulators, often working at the behest of medallion owners (who generally don't drive taxis*), preferred to use fear as a tactic. They would target the drivers with whatever traffic tickets they could find, knowing that it is difficult for these drivers to fight. Greyball made this tactic harder, which forced cities into court directly with Uber, a much fairer matchup.
The really odd thing about greyball, though, is that there's actually no user requirement that the cars in the Uber app be real. They could have just "greyballed" everyone, and use standard anti-fraud practices to prevent someone requesting many trips and never starting them.
* Even where medallion owners are required to be owner-operators, they can often just sit in the taxi queue at the airport doing a crossword for a few hours.
After some confused troubleshooting, I discovered he was looking was printouts of the website he had his secretary make so he could look at it at home.
Had it load a completely different CSS when the logged in user was her account. Good times.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/12/17/world/asia/in...
half way down the page - to suddenly reduce the size of the page content.
And so since its not optimizing for engagement, it is purely aesthetic, but aesthetic in the sense that it can have poor features that other serious companies use. A Fortune 500 website would have notoriously shitty aspects, do that if you want audiences that think that is clout.
Fortunately my non-North American and younger North American audiences don't even care about websites. All commerce is driven straight through chat apps. And do I really want the clientele that thinks I need a website that they will accidentally find on a search engine, or by accidentally typing a .com in the address bar by habit? no. I've considered make my fonts smaller and thinner hoping they think thats a problem and bounce, I like the aesthetics of thinner fonts but its more like thinking maybe I can just ignore the issue from the people who are less likely to be able to read it since they're not the target audience anyway.
I'm pretty much never doing things for SEO. Everyone's just going to click through from a chat app, or a twitter feed because someone else was talking about it. Since a lot of people swear by other e-commerce books that never made them a dime and have opposite advice, maybe I should release my own.
This sounds either very labor-intensive if you use humans, or like a bad customer experience if you use bots.
People get their information from heavily populated channels (one way communication chat rooms run by personalities people like, defacto "influencers"), which are forwarded to people that didn't read it. Permeating many communities and private group chats in minutes.
If it is labor intensive, its only that way for a week or two as you coordinate all of the posts with many channels.
Your bio talks about fintech and digital assets, so perhaps I was imagining the wrong scenarios.
It truly is the cause of and solution to all of your website's problems.
Or to view it more cynically, SEO is the Swiss Army knife that can simultaneously excuse away poor performance while justifying additional expenditure.
It was written probably a decade ago but is unfortunately a classic.
The stats don't lie.. but what is a better way to present information?
If you must hide some information for whatever reason (to preserve space, to increase user engagement metrics), perhaps tabs would work. They can have useful labels which are better than the navigation dots on the carousel.
if you don't have space, then you have too much information and need to make prioritization decisions
carousels are often the reflection of the inability to make a decision
1. Write a short summary of every content phase, and initially just straight up list those summaries each linking to details[0].
2. As an improvement, consider if you want the user to click/tap to expand a point without leaving the page. Pay special attention to accessibility, tabindex, aria-describedby et al. as you do that.
3. At certain viewport sizes, you may put details to the side, and highlight the expanded point.
4. Then, as a final step, you could also cycle expanded points until first user input. Respect prefers reduced motion flag.
Voilà, you have a carousel but thought-through, accessible and purposeful.
[0] There is a natural limit on the number of points that can be shown. Make sure to be clear about the purpose of the widget. If a business is attempting to list more than 4–5 points, either there is a problem with focus or there are nearly non-overlapping audiences (e.g., seller/buyer) and resource should correspondingly be split into multiple entry points. These are aspects where design cannot be decoupled from business decisions.
Thanks for the share.
They’re not so good for text heavy or ‘critical’ content that you want people to definitely read.
It helps if the content is visual and users can see the next slide peeking through, it hints that there’s more to see. Autoplay is always bad imo
Some previous discussions:
2 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23754676
9 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6018316
Coincidence?