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Monday, November 02, 2009

More Needless Fanfare - Carousel Merry-Go-Round

Ok, latest offender in animation that goes beyond annoying and creates a sense of wooziness in the user -- Vignette Media.

Here is a screencast of this carousel gone wild.



What is happening is if you move the cursor to the dead center (horizontally) the animation will grind to a halt. If you move to the right it will rapidly get faster until it gives the true sense of the merry go round from the playgrounds of my childhood. Same if you move to the left. Doubt users will discover this "control" and even if they did it is really, really hard to use.

Needless is all I have to say. Thanks Theresa for sending it my way.

UPDATE: Forgot to mention the tagline "Your consumers want it: An engaging experience." Wow.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Carousel interfaces generally work well when there are next and previous buttons IMHO. And yes, this is an example of how many designer poorly do it as I have seen in countless implementations of this interface.

Anonymous said...

Really does make me feel dizzy.

Eric Wood said...

This is wrong in so many ways...

The source of my own "opto-mechanical feedback resonance" was the fact that I found myself wanting to click on an specific image- which only served to speed up the carousel and chase the image around.

I think it would have been more successful if each image were magnetic and your mouse pointer could attract it. That way you could directly access the image you wanted rather than indirectly use the mouse to control the carousel to attempt to stop your desired image in the front center.

DigitalSeraphim said...

If you have dual monitors (or a really wide, hi res single monitor), move the carousel as far as you can to one side so that you can still see it, then click and drag to the other side of the screen(s). Enough to nauseate you!