Effective Home Page Carousels

The ubiquitous carousel appears on most of today’s business websites. A carousel is the large banner of scrolling images usually taking up a home page’s most valuable “real estate” – at the top, or “above the fold,” of the website.  As an example, see our own home page carousel.

The large images auto forward or users can choose to scroll through the images to view at their choosing. Carousels usually offer some indication (or navigation) that there is more than one piece of featured content, or frame, within the carousel.  

Taking a Closer Look

The researchers at Nielsen Norman Group recently took a close look at the user experience offered by website carousels.  They measured whether users noticed the carousels, and analyzed the user experience navigating through the images and text in each frame.

In the humorously titled article Designing Effective Carousels: Create a Fanciful Amusement, Not a House of Horrors, research shows that people often scroll past carousels.

This could be a function of “banner blindness” – when users simply don’t notice banners or other large objects on a web page that they perceive as too promotional.  If a carousel is offered on the page, however, good navigation and content can help make it effective.

Research Recommendations

The article offers some valuable tips when it comes to carousels.

As an example, many website developers use a carousel in the hopes that people will see a variety of content.  Researchers find, however, that some people will only see the first frame or none at all.  Developers are wise to ensure that important content is placed mindfully in the information architecture and on other pages of the site.

In any carousel’s navigation, ensure the buttons and links are clear, large enough to decipher and click, and the selected frame’s button appears selected. This is all part of a user centered design process.

Mobile viewing must also be considered. For some users, it’s easier to swipe a mobile screen to navigate through a carousel of images than to locate and click little arrows to navigate a carousel with a mouse.

Recent TecEd Research

TecEd has teamed with various clients to perform usability testing and evaluation of websites that included carousels.  While some of our findings confirm Nielsen Norman Group’s study, other findings about the UX of the carousels are a bit of a departure.

• Carousels flag important content: In a recent study, testing showed that users paid attention to a company’s homepage carousel because they said it indicated content that was important to the company.
• Carousels encourage site exploration: We found that half the users tested clicked a carousel image in their “free” site-exploration task.
• Intuitive carousel navigation helps the user experience:  In our study, much like the findings in the article cited above, the carousel navigation helped users understand how to move through the images.  The carousel being tested contained thumbnails of all its images and was found to be intuitive to use. Most users easily navigated the carousel by clicking the thumbnails and then clicked the large image to drill down.
• Carousels not always a good fit: We have learned from other projects that the home page carousel is not always a desired design element. In one case, testing and analytics showed that the majority of web visitors did not click through the home page carousel. Our client decided to use a static “highlighted image” area for important content.

Final Thoughts

Why perform this type of user research?

Testing the usability of carousels is just one example of how user testing helps those designing websites create the best experience for their users.

Instead of jumping on the carousel ride, it makes sense to measure whether users find carousels easy to use, or if they are even noticed.