The Carousel
Flagged on sight documentedThe carousel is what a homepage does instead of making a decision. Five stakeholders, five banners, one rotating frame — the conflict resolved by hiding four of the five messages at any moment and animating the evidence. The pattern's popularity is entirely internal: it solves a meeting, not a user need.
The record is unusually one-sided: interaction concentrates overwhelmingly on the first slide, auto-rotation moves content while people are reading it (an accessibility failure on its own — WCAG's pause-stop-hide criterion exists substantially because of this pattern), and banner-blindness treats the whole region as an ad. The Institute flags it on sight; the burden of proof sits with the carousel.
Survives only as
- A user-driven gallery of equivalent items (product photos), swiped by choice, never auto-rotating
- A browsing shelf where sequence is the content (episode rails) — with full keyboard and pause control
Dies as
- The homepage hero rotator — the canonical form
- Any auto-advancing frame containing text someone might be reading
- A compromise between departments
Why documented: The case against is published: interaction concentrates on the first slide, and WCAG 2.2.2 Pause, Stop, Hide exists substantially because of auto-rotation.