Carousels are lazy

The national Portuguese TV Channels website, RTP, just relaunched their website today and as many news based websites, they make extensive use of carousel widgets. This kind of widget was created to present a series of related visual content, like a photo album, in a space-saving fashion. However, it is now often abused as a lazy way to relinquish editorial power. Say that you have three possible news pieces to showcase. A proper content editor would look at them, and given his knowledge of the website audience would select one of them. Now there’s no need. Just throw them into a carousel widget and show all three. Let the user decide what he likes best.

Not only is this lazy editorials, it’s also a usability problem. Say you’re reading a newspaper and a news piece catches your eye. Later on, you might wanna show it to someone and you know where to find it relatively quick. Now take a website built with a lot of “boxes”, each box with its own tabs (which are fine to aggregate common themed content) and each tab with two or more carousel widget stops. You now have hundreds of different variations of the homepage. If something catched your attention in one of them, good luck finding it in 5 minutes time. It’s like having to sift through hundreds of newspapers to find the piece you’re interested in. Never mind the fact that in a few hours the news piece will be hidden forever into the dungeons of the content management system, but that’s a different war.

On top of this, most users won’t care to browse all these carousel stops. They’re often content with looking at the first page, so why use carousels at all for displaying news pieces?

The web might not constrained to the physical boundaries of a piece of paper, but that’s no reason to relinquish editorial control, so stop being lazy and embrace the constraints of your layout.