@Dave – Sorry about that. Fixed!

@Chuck – Super interesting stuff. I’d love to see a test where image sliders are used to weave a story to achieve one goal. As long as the user has the control over the slider movement, I think it should work well. But test, test, test — the mantra must be used fir validation. 🙂

@Yuna – That’s right. Image sites like Pinterest can take advantage of image sliders as long as the user is handed over the control for movement of sliders.

Glad you found the article useful. 🙂

Of course, it’s even better when it’s easily controlled. I try to find a way to control it. Sometimes there is that option.

So, my take away is that the slider should be controlled in some way.

Sliders are great for seeing a lot of pictures at one time. The pinterest type sometimes looks cluttered to me.

I do appreciate this article and it has some very valid points. Thanks! 🙂

What I don’t like about this article is that you are opening a new window on me when I click an external link. Maybe next article should be titled How to Annoy Users by Opening New Windows ?

But if you have to have a slider, have a user-controlled one with small thumbnails of what the other slides have on the bottom or the right.

@Brian, agree with your points to an extent.

1. “I think this question is asking us to leap to a conclusion far beyond what the data supports.” – Maybe, yes. But it wasn’t completely baseless.

I meant to write this as an opinionated piece. And even though the data stated before this statement might not seem sufficient, the links to known conversion experts, like Peep Laja and others (strongly recommending not to use carousels) support that statement and should be sufficient, I believe.

2. The appeal of the content does matter. But carousels mean that you’re providing multiple choice to your users, which often reduces conversions.

2.1. Yes, I wish someone runs a test comparing automatically rotating sliders with user-controlled sliders. 🙂

3. Not sure why you’d say that? The points apply to almost all image carousels, I believe. You have any example for me where this won’t apply?

4. I’m guessing your casement window gallery only display images in the carousel?

1) It’s a university website. I’d be leery about blindly assuming that something which is true at one nonprofit website is also true for a commercial website. This needs to be tested.

2) ND’s gallery focused on secondary elements which were not terribly relevant or interesting to visitors. Generally, most of the galleries I have running right now direct customers towards the most popular pages.

2.1) We don’t have any data comparing the clickthrough rate on these links when they were in an automatically rotating gallery vs. as a user-controlled gallery. This is the only way to compare whether the gallery’s rotation is the main factor or whether there are outside factors (e.g. whether the content is interesting).

3) This test would only apply to home pages.

4) The above data appears to rest on the assumption that an image is only useful if it causes someone to click through. When I use galleries on subcategory pages (e.g. to show off casement windows to convince someone to call in for a window quote), clickthrough rate is not a consideration.

I’d definitely recommend testing auto-rotating galleries vs. manually rotated galleries vs. a single static image, though.