Notes on web design: Auto sliders are obsolete.
Web Design, Website Usability
The year is 2011, and for a while now, the team here at Ziller have been predicting change when it comes to the user of an automatic image rotator, or auto slider, on the home page of prominent eCommerce websites.
If you’re new to this concept, to give you a bit of a background, home page sliders are more or less banners that rotate through their images automatically. Sort of like the automatic commercial billboards you see inside of a train station or airport.
They’ve been around for a while now, and originally came to fruition with many major eCommerce websites with a large range of products. Automatic sliders are quite beneficial for businesses because they save space on valuable ‘real estate’ throughout the home page, meaning the business can cram as much marketing material, product sales and offers into the banner as they want without any imposition on home page space.
From a business point of view, you can see why most eCommerce websites would deploy and automatic slider above the fold of their web page. But are automatic sliders really that effective? The answer is no, and here’s why….
Despite the benefits from the business end of things, automatic rotating images banners are actually a usability nightmare when it comes to keeping the attention of the user.
As you’re well aware, the home page of a website is highly likely to be the first element of a web page seen by users. As a result, any element contained within a home page should be considered most important to the business.
In the case of home page sliders, there’s a bit of an underlying psychology. To cut to the chase, they’re distracting and they detract the user’s attention from other valuable elements on a web page. With an image constantly flashing to a new slide every 5-10 seconds, from a user’s point of view this can be extremely distracting when you’re trying to occupy yourself with another page element as you’ll find that your eyes are vectoring immediately towards the sparkly, pretty new image.
It’s like peripheral vision, if you’re driving a car and something flashes out of the corner of your eye, you’ll naturally react to it. Well, the same goes with automatic rotating image banners on a web page!
As of 2011, we’re beginning to see a lot of big eCommerce stores take their slide off ‘automatic’ and instead, program them to be in the complete control of the user. The end result of this is that the slider only activates when a user either clicks on, or hovers over it with their cursor. When they do this, it is at their control and it exactly where there eyes want to be.
We thought we’d take this opportunity to demonstrate some major eCommerce stores who have moved away from the automatic slider, instead opting for the user-controlled sliders.
eBay Australia’s website – A nice, user-friendly slider with hover controls. Exactly what you want to keep the user’s attention at all times.
37signals’ website – Same again. These guys have heaps of services to offer, but do you think that they’re auto-rotating them in your face? No way.
And of course, we wouldn’t finish our post without pointing out those with room for improvement…
Dick Smith’s website – Our suggestion to these guys is to remove the ‘pause and play’ functions completely. While the slider looks good, it’s still set to automatically rotate when you land on the home page. Kind of annoying when you have to press ‘pause’ to browse through the page undistracted!
Harvey Norman’s website – One of Australia’s biggest retailers. They’re slider is stuck on turbo, just try and read through the home page without being distracted!
So what are your thoughts on auto rotating sliders in eCommerce website design? Let us know, and feel free to share some of your own examples

















