Universal design and usability investigation into carousel interaction

Abstract

This research is about the accessibility and usability of web carousel. There are several kinds of Carousel available that are being used in different parts of a website. But enough research is yet to be done to find out whether carousel is universally accessible & usable or not. This research is pushed three research questions and throughout the research it is tried to find out the answer of those questions. Experimental quantitative method had been implemented for this study. Total of 40 users participated in this experiment. Two web site prototypes were designed for this purpose, only differing for the presence of carousel and without carousel to compare the accessibility and usability of a carousel. The experiment is divided into two sections, one is during the experiment and another is post-experimental questionnaires. The post-experimental questionnaires are designed on a Likert-type scale. By comparing task spent time, error & post-experimental questionnaire responses, the comparison between those two prototypes has been measured. This study especially focused on the desktop view of a carousel. The whole experiment was conducted from a laptop, it didn’t consider the mobile view of a carousel. The overall result indicated that carousel might not the best way to present important contents of a website. Users mostly get confused when they use carousel prototype for the first time. Carousel has many accessibility and usability issues which suggested that it is better to avoid using a carousel on any kind of website.