Carousels - yay or nay

Hi Craig, welcome back!

In the interest of collaborative patterns, we’re now using the community as a sort of wiki to house patterns which aren’t part of the distribution yet - this is a great case for that. I’ll get the post set-up and link to it here so that you and the dev can comment there directly.

Your post gives some great perspective which hasn’t been raised yet.

I think the for/against may have gone a little off-track with carousels - it’s a highly contentious issue! There are plenty of arguments that can become an entire thread of their own, such as:

  • Are stakeholder needs a priority over user needs?
  • Should designers ‘pick battles’ and allow some things in place of others?
  • Are carousels even that bad for UX?
  • Have things changed?
  • When does an image slider become the evil twin, a rotating banner advert?

I’m going to set up the draft pattern with some do/don’t suggestions based on common research and my own experience. I don’t want the pattern just to be a smear-piece on carousels - there are times a carousel is the right thing (such as photo galleries, or…galleries of photos). We also want to make sure that in cases where a stakeholder has misunderstood what they will get from a carousel, we provide the assistance needed to support the designers and developers in suggesting a better solution - not just a “UX vs. Stakeholder” solution but a better solution for the stakeholder.

Would your dev be able to drop their carousel JS/CSS/HTML into codepen for us? We can use that as part of the pattern (and give you both a contributor badge, the highest honour!)

Hey there,
I’m trying to find out if there’s any more progress, or if there’s likely to be any more progress on the carousel development?
Have read through the discussion and feel that the slider/carousel featured on the Home page of Planning NSW for their media releases is a functional component in that context.
We’d like to use one for similar content—any chance there’s one coming to the Design System?
Thanks,
Carole