Should I Use a Carousel? (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Should I Use a Carousel? (2013)

shouldiuseacarousel.com

99 pointscoffeecoders48 comments

How many other user interactions are generally considered objectively bad practice? Sure, there may be a time and place, but what is frequently overused?

Toasts:

- https://maxschmitt.me/posts/toasts-bad-ux

- https://youtu.be/LeCKu0HqGFQ?si=xKApVFSqdzLGF0SD

Modals (being a special case of modes):

- https://modalzmodalzmodalz.com/

Modes:

- https://www.nngroup.com/articles/modes/

- https://ilyabirman.net/meanwhile/all/timed-modes/

What else?

Disabling right click. I often want to open up various products in multiple tabs so that I can then go through them and select one to buy. When a website disables right click, I often just give up and don't buy anything.

Similar is having "links" that are actually implemented using an onClick handler so that I can't right click and select "open in new tab". Often this results in me later realizing that I opened the link's image in a new tab rather than the link itself.

> I often want to open up various products in multiple tabs so that I can then go through them and select one to buy. When a website disables right click, I often just give up and don't buy anything.

Hold Ctrl with left hand, and click-click-click with your right hand

Does your mouse have a scroll wheel? They always(afaik) can be clicked by pressing down, called a middle click.

Middle clicking links opens them in a new tab, at least in Firefox.

On X11 you can even select any text and middle click the new tab button to search for the selected text / open the URL in a new tab

Interesting. Didn't know that one. Thanks!

Burger menus. Don’t hide the links you want people to use.

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/hamburger-menus/

Splash screens (fortunately mostly dead on the web, but still in use on mobile).

https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

The article about how hamburger menus are bad has a hamburger menu. The "why nn/g" page[0] subtitle says "We practice what we preach". Really?

I maintain a website with around 15 subpages. What should I use instead?

[0]: https://www.nngroup.com/about/why-nng/

They do practice what they preach. Scroll down to the bottom of the article where they give their recommendations. Their site follows those recommendations.

Ah! Thanks.

Infinite scroll. Both because it's frustrating not to know how much content there is and because the lack of pagination often makes finding what you want difficult.

Not positive, but I think our product added toasts to comply with ADA/VPAT requirements on confirming the user got a second page of data in the table that are viewing and clicked "next" for. I think it had to do with having both audio and visual acknowledgement of the action.

Otherwise, we would have to physically page or add dialogues people would have to click to close, just to see page 2 of table data

>What else?

Being anything other than a static page where I get your company’s phone number to call and talk to someone whose first language is my own.

If a website interaction has to lead me to a phone call in order to get something useful done, that website has completely failed.

Ideally I never want to have to pick up my phone at all. Customer support is an exception to that, but only as a last resort: if it gets to the point that I have to call a business, something has gone very very wrong.

I believe you two are in agreement, they go to the website to get a phone number to call the company to talk about something that needs human interaction, they cannot get any phone number at all some times, or they can only get one with a bot that says I don't understand a lot - as a consequence "that website has completely failed"

> Customer support is an exception to that, but only as a last resort: if it gets to the point that I have to call a business, something has gone very very wrong.

It is a common thing that people say - hmm, this is a complicated situation and a human needs to be talked to (probably these people don't understand how impressive AI is) and modern UX as a cost saving measure absolutely fails a customers need to talk to a human at the company they are getting a service from.

Haha, customers want to aks unreasonable or insane questions, replace a good process with a bad one and tell you their life story. They might even need to talk with a normal person about normal things. Refusal might be expensive. If you can bring an insane request within the boundaries of possibility they can't help but appreciate it.

So, you just want the phone book. Yellowpages.com should do it?

I would love if we returned to a day when I could find a company's phone number as easily as just looking it up in a phone book.

Yes, this would be a vast improvement. Most companies don’t even take inbound calls anymore, though.

>talk to someone

The death of tables. Modern “tables” often cannot be sorted, copy and/or paste don’t work, not expandable or shrinkable. And often the table will be presented unsorted and you just have to scroll. Just trash.

Likewise, the number of times I’ve run into a search box not wildcarding your searches is unforgivable.

Marquee was so bad that the whole tag got deprecated (I am probably dating myself).

I remember marquees! Wasn't it \<m> or something?

Man I wish I could find the first HTML book I ever read. Must have read it in 1994 or something. It used "Mosaic" browser, which looked nothing like the IE3 or IE4 that I had. Wow, this brings back so many memories.

If anyone can ever find that book on Amazon, please let me know! I've been looking for years.

MDN's got your back: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

I recognize this might not help you, but my first one was one of those huge Unleashed books "HTML and CGI" <https://books.google.com/books/about/HTML_and_CGI_unleashed....> which it seems one can still buy for $5

My first real web job out of collage was introducing HTX/IDX[1] to a shop that was still using Visual C++ to make CGI because C++ was the only hammer they had in their toolbox :sob:

1: I'm actually shocked that they still serve documentation for it https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/iis/6.0-...

Don't forget <blink>

Hijacking scroll, icons with no explanation, auto hiding content, not enough contrast between content and background, etc.

"Mystery meat navigation" has become standard

Point taken. It was really annoying to try to read one of the slides of the carousel because it kept moving.

I found it very readable w/ my default Javascript-diasbled configuration. It wasn't until I viewed the page w/o my plugins loaded that I got the message.

People who are going to disable JavaScript, are going to disable JavaScript.

People who won't, wont.

Neither camp needs to proselytize the other, nor is it ever very effective.

And bragging about which side you're on is weird.

"I disable JS" always felt to me like the "I don't own a TV" elitism-brag.

That's an amusing reference, been a while since I've seen one, I assume because computer screens make tvs pointless.

I wonder if there's a more current version? Not having a smartphone perhaps?

2005: I don't have a TV

2015: I don't have a smartphone

2020: I don't have social media

2025: I don't have friends

> computer screens make TVs pointless

...if you live alone in a dorm room?

To be fair, if you're going to just be a genuinely superior person than other people are, you might as well just brag about that superiority since there's nothing else it's useful for.

I guess the rest of the sentence is "... if TVs were a fundamental pre-requisite for modern life"

> Yeah, bro, I rub two sticks together to cook my own deer meet, because Big Grocery is tracking me

Clearly I hit a nerve. I was just trying to make the point that w/o Javascript the example kinda fell flat. I didn't think I was bragging, but apparently I was. (I just prefer to turn on Javascript when I need it-- I find a lot of sites a lot less distracting w/o it.)

I thought for sure this was going to be one of those "isfirefoxfastyet" style sites that was just a <h1>no</h1> but I guess the message is driven further home by hiding the "no" in the 2nd "page" of the carousel

This is not a carousel. It's a slideshow.

Netflix movie selector is a carousel

Makes me nostalgic for figurative carousels.

That's what the linked site shows. Did you mean literal carousels?

No, I meant figurative, it is no longer 2013 and we don't party like that any more.

Sadly it's now part of CSS.

Thanks, Google. https://adrianroselli.com/2025/05/my-request-to-google-on-ac...

I haven't seen carousels lately, seems like the trend has mostly died out.

Scroll-linked effects are the new carousels.

I do not possess enough rage to express at the "let me swoosh in content only at the last possible pixel so that you think there's no more content" pages

I saw them on websites maybe twice in the past week.

Every one of our client sites have one. It's proving to be a pain, so maybe that will change soon.

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