Hi Elizabeth, Here's some thoughts.
Carousels like the one in Amnesty Australia (http:// www.amnesty.org.au/) are good for displaying site highlights, main stories, new products and generally getting attention and clicks to some particular pages that you think people would like to visit. It's great when you want to cherry-pick material and give your good stuff a lot of screen estate.
However, it's slow and frustrating for site navigation - and using tabs and arrows only makes it worse. I wouldn't use it as a navigation design pattern. Think about it this way: clicking the carousel isn't a goal. Getting into the content is.
Carousels that hide content is bad for navigation, because the user will have to click through everything to see what's available. Carousels that display a centered item plus some side items is a little better, but the users would still have to 1) click to focus to the content and 2) open it. Step 1 is unnecessary excise work.
So, I wouldn't put tabs on top of a carousel, but I would consider having a separate carousel on top of each main section of the site, if the sections contains material that need highlighting. Just keep the user interaction _inside_ the carousel element simple. Amnesty's 1-2-3-4 approach works.
For visual navigation: Grid is a good option if you want to do visual navigation, because one click is enough to get to the content. Grid plus tabs would also work, if the groupings make sense and the tabs have meaningful labels. Grid plus arrows also work, but you have to display clearly how many screens or pages of content there is. The drawback is that grid'ed items can't be as big, but I don't know a design pattern that would combine the visual appeal of a carousel and the snappiness of a grid.
iTunes 9 Store has a pretty good implementation of carousels and tabbed navigation. Carousels are used to highlight popular and featured material, and tabbed drop-downs give access to all of what's available. That, and a good search, will work great most of the time.
Consider soft transitions between carousel changes, such that it doesn't steal attention when the user is trying to concentrate on another part of the page.
(Sorry, I don't have any usability reports to share :) Best, Petteri -- Petteri Hiisilä Senior Interaction Designer, owner / iXDesign Mobile: 650-450-6014 (USA), +358505050123 (FIN) Twitter: http://twitter.com/petterihiisila LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/petterihiisila On Sep 13, 2009, at 12:29 PM, elizabeth wrote:
Hello, I'm working on a website where the client is considering putting an animated carousel on the home page which would have a big image and a small description and a link to "read more" or take some other kind of action. I was wondering whether people have seen any usability studies or know of any eye tracking reports which show whether these carousels are effective in getting the user´s attention and click throughs? - I wonder if they might not be victims of banner blindness? Also, do the ones with tabs or arrows get people interacting and navigating them? This one is an example of one which I think is quite effective: http://www.amnesty.org.au/ (though you can't pause it). Obviously, good usabiliity here is a mixture of getting the timing right between image changes, using eye-catching images, getting the spatial relationship right to group images, buttons and descriptions, keeping the rest of the page free of competing images and ads etc. But is that enough?! Regards, Elizabeth
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