Website carousel with automatic rotation or not? Find it out

If you’re a heavy Instagram user, shop online, and surf the web, you’re probably familiar with the carousel concept on the site, even if you don’t recognize it by name.

The carousel on the site is named after the toy that is known in amusement parks that is constantly rotating and returning to the same point. This tool makes it possible for a space that would only display one piece of information to display many more.

 

What is a carousel in ecommerce?

 

The carousel is nothing more than a junction of banners in the same space that alternate to be displayed to the user. The carousel has become very popular on ecommerce sites in Brazil, especially on HomePages.

This slideshow makes it possible to display different content, which makes perfect sense for an ecommerce site that wants to talk to each of its users with different messages.

On a carousel, you can display products from different categories without having to fit them all into a single banner. With the variety of banners being displayed in alternation, their sizes can be large enough in addition to photos to have information that is highly visible to the customer, as there is no need to compete for screen space with other ads.

 

Carousel rotation on the website

 

The carousel, in turn, can have an automatic rotation or not, and to make this decision, some aspects must be taken into account:

 

• Auto rotation shows customers who would not manually rotate the carousel the other banners that might interest them
• Manual rotation allows the user to keep their attention where they are most interested and can rotate the banner whenever they want.

 

However, this decision must be linked to some other aspects:

 

Carousel turn time

The carousel that has automatic rotation is programmed to change banners every x seconds.

These x seconds must be well chosen so that the user can view the information of each of the banners in full, after all, the objective is to display the content.

 

Pass buttons

Regardless of whether the rotation is automatic or not, it is essential that the user can pass the slide whenever they want.

For this, it must be clearly shown that this possibility exists and this must be done through buttons with arrows or swatches that indicate how to carry out the action.

 

Pause the carousel

In this aspect, there is a divergence when we talk about mobile and desktop. The possible pause on the carousel to calmly view the content of a particular banner is performed with the mouse located on the image being displayed.

With this, it is understood that the user is checking the content and the rotation is paused.

When it comes to mobile, it is not possible to track this intention, and for this reason, the decision to have an automatic rotation on mobile may not be assertive.

 

Stop on carousel

Unlike pausing the carousel for a few moments, when the mouse is located over the image, the stop is definitive.

When the user rotates the carousel manually, it is understood that he has already understood that this possibility exists and performed this action because he wants to view specific content. As a result, the rotation is definitely no longer automatic.