The recommendations generated by our Recolize Recommendation Engine are delivered in the form of a carousel by default:
A carousel is a component that contains a list of elements (preferably images) that can either be horizontally or vertically displayed. The navigation works in both directions (left-right or top-down) and may additionally be created with or without an animation, e.g. a blending effect.
The carousel is nowadays used on a variety of websites as preferred display format (e.g. the Facebook Carousel).
Which benefits does the Recolize article carousel offer?
- Content-independent
The carousel can be filled with arbitrary content like text, images or videos. - Arbitrary number of articles
Because of its efficient space usage the carousel is perfectly suited for little and large amounts of articles and in any case uses only as much space as available. - Responsive
The carousel adapts to any output device. The number of simultaneously shown articles can be configured individually for every screen resolution. - Position freely
It doesn’t matter if you want to place the carousel in the main content stage or in a page sidebar, in the header or in the footer – it always integrates perfectly independent of the position into the available space. - Smart navigation
Besides the standard navigation arrows one can also use the swipe functionality which is well-known from the daily smartphone usage. It offers a very easy, intuitive and haptically appealing style of switching the recommended articles.
What do you have to consider when using the article carousel?
Of course when using the carousel you have to take care to present the information to the user in a clear and straightforward way. It is therefore recommended to keep the number of shown articles within the carousel below 20.
Additionally you should avoid extensive sliding effects and automatic page switching so that the visitor is not distracted or confused.
The Recolize carousel focuses on minimal effects and limits the number of recommended articles to 10.
Within one of the next blog posts we will show you which further flexible ways of presenting your recommendations are possible with the Recolize Recommendation Engine.
