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!)