The home page slide show is a popular website feature. It allows you to have a good size visual up front, and because it is a slide show you can feature many important messages.
Unfortunately, this approach can cause some significant usability issues. The result: nothing in your slide show has an impact on your site visitors.
Jakob Nielsen just published the results of a usability study that seriously calls into question the effectiveness of auto-forwarding carousels and accordions. In the study, users were not able to find information found in a home page slide even though it at the top of the page in 98-point font.
Nielsen cites the following issues:
- Slides often use fancy formatting, which is most often ignored)
- Slides often look somewhat like a banner ad, and many people ignore anything on a webpage that looks like a banner ad
- The auto-rotation to show a new panel every 5 seconds.
Auto-forwarding causes many usability problems:
- Moving UI elements usually reduce accessibility, particularly for users with motor skill issues who have difficulty clicking something before it’s taken away.
- Low-literacy users often don’t have enough time to read the information before it’s removed.
- International users also read more slowly if your site is not in their native language, and thus won’t be able to understand a panel if it’s displayed only briefly.
- The probability that users will spot the item is drastically reduced when only one thing is displayed at any given time.
- It’s annoying for users to lose control of the user interface when things move around of their own accord.
The researcher concludes that accordions and carousels should show a new panel only when users ask for it . Otherwise, it should stand still and let users read the information.
Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net
