Android application design is one of the coolest things in the entire process of building a mobile app. A number of factors are to be taken care of, and a lot goes into developing and designing UX for the mobiles as well as on websites. Among all, one of the design elements that design companies muddle with is carrying out carousel design and slider designs.
More often, mobile users consider Carousel and Sliders to be same. However, there are some technical and visual design aspects that determine how these layouts vary in terms of the actual design application
Carousel Design Vs. Slider Design
Carousel View in Android app is meant for helping mobile users to access various image content of the website in the form of a circular movement. The circular movement through touch gesture provides a very smooth user experience.
Also Read: Exploring Android Carousel View
On the other hand, sliders are vertical or horizontal images that do not have any perspective whether it is being rotated radially or not. An Android carousel design is a well-known design pattern for a few image content while sliders can have various applications.
Which Is Better?
Carousels and sliders both have significant applications in homepage design. Though usable, sliders have a broad application as compared to carousels. Sliders can be of any type, such as a slider that you see in an Android device used to increase or decrease the volume etc. On the other hand, the key objective of a carousel design is to connect the web and mobile users with the UI and let them dive into the UX in a very intuitive manner.
Demerits Of Carousel/Slider Design
Although Carousels play a significant role in uplifting the homepage design as well as in the User Experience, one must take into the account several disadvantages of these design layouts.
- Slow Website Performance- Carousels adversely affect the load-time of websites which is one of the major considerations of professional business website design. Since all the sliders, carousels and other graphics are built on jQuery, they tend to slow down the website.
- Ineffective SEO and Reduced Conversion- Slow loading speed leads to serious SEO issues and as a result, bounce rate increases yielding low search engine rankings and poor conversion. Additionally, all the image content without alt text is not indexed by search engines.
- These Are Not Mobile-Friendly- Carousels and sliders are not mobile friendly as they consume a lot of time in loading graphical content. And from the perspective of an app’s performance, it is a bad idea to keep too much of graphical content.
What’s The Way Out
One of the useful alternatives to using sliders and carousel design is to switch to Hero layouts. These are quite useful for a website and very much suitable for mobile UX design. Hero images let you reveal the real content that will be indexed by the search engines. They overcome the limitations of carousels as they are static and have faster loading time. At the same time, in mobile apps, they are quite consistent and suitable for your SEO needs.
