Before I get too far into the weeds, I want to express my gratitude that rotating banners/carousels have finally become a dated element stylistically. I’ve been standing and yelling on this particular soapbox for almost two decades. Unfortunately, library websites have often been hangers-on to many poor web practices, and carousels can still be seen on a good number of library websites even now. Please remove them so I can stop shouting about them already.
It’s not hard to understand why libraries still cling to rotating banner elements. They seem to solve a difficult problem: five departments have something important to promote, but there’s only one prominent spot on the homepage. Put everything in a rotating carousel, and everyone gets a turn.
It’s hard to navigate these mini turf wars, so tools like carousels are used as appeasers to keep everyone from beating the shit out of each other.—Brad Frost, UX expert
Unfortunately, visitors don’t experience a carousel as a fair distribution of homepage space. They see the first slide…maybe. They likely never see the others. And if the slides move automatically, the one they were reading can disappear before they’re finished.
The Problems
Automatic rotation creates problems beyond missed promotions. Motion can be distracting. A visitor reading a slide may lose their place when it changes. On a phone, a large carousel can occupy most of the screen while making its other slides even less apparent. The Nielsen Norman Group’s research on automatic carousels describes how advancing content reduces its visibility and can frustrate people trying to use it.
There’s an accessibility obligation, too. Under WCAG 2.1 success criterion 2.2.2, Pause, Stop, Hide, automatically moving content that lasts more than five seconds and appears alongside other content generally needs a way to pause, stop, or hide it. The W3C carousel tutorial also explains how to make carousel controls usable by keyboard and understandable to assistive technology. Meeting those requirements takes expertise and testing. It still doesn’t make a carousel the best way to organize a library homepage.
And then there are the graphics. Unless someone has the time and skills to do them well, a carousel can quickly become a parade of stretched photos, tiny text, competing fonts, and flyers squeezed into the wrong shape. The most useful information often ends up embedded in an image, where it’s harder to read on a phone and likely unavailable to assistive technology. Large images in a carousel can make it very clear, very quickly, that the library doesn’t have any available graphic design talent. And users key into that information the minute they hit the page that carousel resides on.
If five announcements all need the “top spot,” that’s a conversation that needs to be had about priorities. A carousel doesn’t automatically settle it. It just hides the disagreement behind a widget.
Could a carefully designed, manually controlled carousel work? A guarded “maybe.” But before adding one, ask a more powerful question: Wouldn’t these links and announcements be easier to find if we just showed them on the page? For most library homepages, I think the answer is yes.