I do think carousels have an important place in design: collapsing repetitive but possibly relevant content.
Example:
You are a contractor who makes their living off of their reputation. You have a set of testimonials (maybe 5-8).
A user visiting your website may be browsing for several reasons - and may or may not be interested in what others have to say about you. Collapsing all of the testimonials down into a single carousel shows you have testimonials and allows the user to browse through them if they’d like without forcing them to scroll through each one.
This content is repetitive - if you’ve seen one that conveys enough information - but each one potentially provides incremental reassurance for a user if they need that.
The animation is still annoying and distracting to the other users who don’t need the incremental reassurance. A “Testimonials” link to a separate testimonials page would be perfectly adequate, for those users who are interested in that. It even has the benefit that they can read through the testimonials at their own pace, and that you can include longer testimonials that wouldn’t fit in the carousel box.
> A “Testimonials” link to a separate testimonials page would be perfectly adequate, for those users who are interested in that.
This is one of those things that really needs A/B testing. I'd bet the other direction: that sites get more conversions if they show a few testimonials on the landing page, than if there's a link to a page full of them but none directly on the landing page. Of course, you could just do both.
The Steam app has had a carousel at the top of the store page for years (maybe over a decade).
I actually find it quite informative, and given it's longevity on the platform maybe Valve had decided it has commercial benefit too?
Example:
You are a contractor who makes their living off of their reputation. You have a set of testimonials (maybe 5-8).
A user visiting your website may be browsing for several reasons - and may or may not be interested in what others have to say about you. Collapsing all of the testimonials down into a single carousel shows you have testimonials and allows the user to browse through them if they’d like without forcing them to scroll through each one.
This content is repetitive - if you’ve seen one that conveys enough information - but each one potentially provides incremental reassurance for a user if they need that.