Does this title make you skeptical? I would have been too before I saw the research that led to this article. Ask anyone and they’ll tell you that carousels are an anti-pattern. Don’t use them. But maybe it’s not so cut and dry.

Using real data, this article aims for a better understanding of the current argument against carousels and whether they really deserve the reputation they’ve gained. I’ll break down the arguments point by point and see if our data lines up with those expectations. Through all of that, I’ll detail our findings and methods and make some recommendations on how and when you should use carousels in future.

So, we started looking at the data available to us. At first we were just curious — what does our data show? What we found surprised us enough to encourage us to keep looking. We examined several mid-sized to large e-commerce websites over a period of 11 months. When I say mid-sized to large, I’m talking about websites that do at least $20 million in e-commerce sales per year. During this 11-month period, we sampled approximately 7.5 million carousel interaction events. The conclusions drawn through the rest of this article are based on that data.