Hi Elizabeth,
I'd like to add that I think there are a couple of ways of thinking
about carousels. I think that in a way, they are 2 things:
1) An attempt to imitated a piece of physical interaction that exists
(or rather, existed) in brick-and-mortar CD stores and
2) A kind of user-driven slide show of a subset of content on a site
that is displayed with attractive graphics
Both of these description support the behaviour of browsing a subset
of a content collection In the physical world, you'd never find an
entire store's collection in their carousel. You'd just see it in a
section - perhaps a small bin of recent arrivals or sale items.
Secondly, slideshows of a particular subject are common on the web,
and the idea of a user dragging slides from one end to another offers
an experience that might be seen as more intimate than the play/pause
controls.
In short, Carousels are for making a subset of content more
attractive, because they invite the user to draw on a behaviour they
learned in real life: browsing in a bin. A UI employing them isn't
efficient for navigation, nor is it supposed to be.
Come to think of it, I think Apple's addition of iTunes-style
carousels to the Mac OS Finder was always a bit odd, but I suppose
there are some use cases where such a view could come in handy (such
as a collection of graphics where you'd like to see it as a gallery).
Me, I prefer the Snow Leopard idea of giving the user the option to
the view of a window to really huge previews of content right there in
the window if they want, and even be able to play movies, sounds and
page through document thumbnails (or even slightly larger) without
opening them.
--
David Drucker
Vancouver, BC
[email protected]
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