LESS Carousels

by Danielle Cooley

I mean fewer carousels, of course. But you know, it's not "Fewer Content. More Strategy."

Anyway, Peep Laja (@peeplaja) recently wrote an interesting article outlining all the reasons you're not going to see good ROI on those rotating spotlights you see all over the place these days. 

In all the testing I have done, home page carousels are completely ineffective.For one, anything beyond the initial view has a huge decrease in visitor interaction. And two, the chances that the information being displayed in the carousel matches what the visitor is looking for is slim. So in that case the carousel becomes a very large banner that gets ignored. In test after test the first thing the visitor does when coming to a page with a large carousel is scroll right past it and start looking for triggers that will move them forward with their task. (quote from Craig Kistler)

http://conversionxl.com/dont-use-automatic-image-sliders-or-carousels-ignore-the-fad/

Note that he covers both "Less Content" (getting rid of the carousels) AND "More Strategy" (focusing your message). And if he doesn't quite convince you, consider that he doesn't even mention the effort involved in creating them, the hours spent around a conference table arguing about who gets a piece of this treasured real estate, or the issues they cause for users with disabilities. 

Nice job, Peep.