For carousals, the Marthastewart one is better than the Amnesty International or the Hulu one. while Amnesty's carousal has 1 2 3 4 as the carousal navigation elements, the Hulu one has just blocks on them. Some other carousals have dots on them instead of showing the content title in the carousal. As a user, I need to wait for the next item to reveal itself and can never remember one if i have to revisit. The Marthastewart one clearly states what the content in the carousal is, making it easy to browse through and remember as well. Users are usually short on patience and banner blindness is another issue as well. Regarding accessibility, does javascript still fall under the not-a-good-idea category ? Its evident that updated content, navigation, UI control and all the confusion that could arise out of it for the screen reader/assisted technology user are issues that neither Javascript nor Ajax or Flash resolve at the moment.
Cheers! Manish Govind Pillewar User's Experience + Business Strategy www.studios.thoughtworks.com www.thoughtworks.com | Pune +91 9765407578 Talk to me manishpi manish1022View Profile --- On Mon, 14/9/09, elizabeth <[email protected]> wrote: From: elizabeth <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [IxDA Discuss] Are carousels effective? To: [email protected] Date: Monday, 14 September, 2009, 2:04 PM You folks are great! Thanks for your thoughts. Some of you have actually expressed some of my own fears (accessibility, banner blindness, not to be confused with navigation...). The carousel/slideshow, if it gets off the ground, would have some way to pause it and wouldn't be done in Flash, everything else is yet to be decided. Regarding some of your other comments: Hulu IS pretty cool! It is very eye-catching - nothing else competing for your attention. The only thing there is that people enter the site specifically to watch TV, which makes it a bit different to an information/text-based site. But still a nice example. Another site that kept coming up when I was googling the topic was this one: http://www.marthastewart.com - Different bloggers praised it's carousel/tabbing. I don't think it's too bad either, partly because the tab labels are clear. They still require the user to be in the mood for exploring, though maybe this lady's users do just that. Jay, the content of the client's site is also updated often, and, depending on the day, is pretty important to the site's users so I don't think the content quality would be a major problem. But yep, the best interaction design in the world isn´t any good if the content isn't worth checking out! David, I agree, as casual contextual navigation on secondary pages this element could be very useful. I also like the idea of dragging, that's something to look into. Anees, I haven't come across any examples of timers myself, but can imagine something similar to a typical page loading progress bar animation might do the job. However, I think if there were numbers, it might be distracting. Some way to pause and continue, like playing a video on youtube could work... The other idea I was playing with to avoid all these concerns(!!) was having 2 or 3 different images that load randomly when someone visits the page, that way regular users will see different items, without the animation or the complication of tabs/arrows/descriptions/groupings... Anyway, many thanks for all your input. Other good examples/ideas are always welcome. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=45551 -----Inline Attachment Follows----- ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
