What testing found
- Content in a carousel is missed by most visitors, and few interact with it at all.
- People describe it as looking like an advert, which is enough for them to skip past it without reading.
- Anything after the first panel sees a large fall in engagement, so the later slides are close to unseen.
- Several competing messages occupying one position was named as a cause rather than a benefit: nothing in the rotation gets a clear run at the reader's attention.
The sharpest answer
One reply put the real function bluntly: carousels are effective at telling colleagues that their idea is now on the home page. Its conclusion was that they are a way to place content people will ignore somewhere prominent, which resolves an internal argument about whose message goes at the top without anyone having to decide. It is worth reading as a description of why they persist despite the testing rather than as a joke.
The usability failures underneath
- You cannot link to a slide. There is often no way to send someone the fourth item, because the panel has no address of its own.
- Motion takes control away from the reader — a panel that changes while being read is a problem the reader did not create.
- The chance that whichever slide happens to be showing matches what a visitor came for is low, which turns the whole area into a banner they learn to skip.
What to do instead
- Decide what the page is for and show that, rather than rotating between candidates.
- If several things genuinely matter, lay them out where all of them are visible at once and none of them moves.
- If a carousel is unavoidable, the thread's implied minimum is that it should not auto-advance, and each panel should be linkable.
- The thread is from 2011 and the evidence has not moved since, which is itself notable given how common the pattern remains.