November 05, 2025
| by Sachin WaikarYu Ding’s recent research was inspired by a moment of annoyance.
Ding, an assistant professor of marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business, was watching TV when he saw a lingering red CNN logo on the screen. “It drove me crazy, and I really wanted to switch it off,” he recalls. “But it got me thinking about how brands can keep consumers engaged in those situations when you, unexpectedly, have to wait for something.”
That thought led to a series of studies about online wait times described in a new paper with collaborator Ellie Kyung at Babson College.
Even with the spread of high-speed internet, waiting for content to load is part of the online experience. Users spend significant time watching blank screens or rotating wheels and other types of placeholder animations. “It’s universal,” Kyung says. “If you go on a website, you wait for it to load. But increasingly it’s about waiting for apps and sites to load when we’re on our mobile devices.”
Ding and Kyung were particularly interested in incidental wait times. “Not those progress bars from the old-school internet days: 1% done, 5% done, 50% done,” he explains. “It’s when you don’t expect a wait, like when a high-resolution image is loading. In those cases, consumers are more likely to be annoyed, and design elements can help reduce the perceived wait time.”
The researchers designed a series of studies to test the relationship between animation speed and users’ behavior, including their perception of wait times and their willingness to wait. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that faster animations would be best, they found that moderate-speed animations had better outcomes than slow, fast, or no animations at all.
“There’s an assumption that if something moves faster, it’s better,” Kyung says. “But the midpoint between too fast and too slow or static turns out to be optimal.” These results suggest that choosing the right animation speed for online assets is a low-cost, high-impact way to keep users engaged.
Waiting to Land
In a pilot survey, Ding and Kyung found that the impacts of waiting online are real, with 45% of respondents reporting that they left a site or app if they encountered a wait. Data from an online chat-service company showed that longer wait times led to lower consumer engagement. An examination of 100 sites showed 59% had some form of moving animation, with an average wait time of 5.7 seconds. Of 59 apps examined, 57 used moving animation.
The researchers used those baselines to design multiple studies in experimental and real-life settings with wait times ranging from 7 to 30 seconds and animation speeds ranging from 400–500 milliseconds per rotation (fast) to 2,000–2,500 ms (moderate) to 10,000 ms (slow).
Three experiments involving more than 1,400 participants showed moderate-speed animations led to the lowest perceived wait times across different animation types, wait times, and devices.
In another study, Ding and Kyung looked at “click-to-landing” rates — what proportion of users are retained or lost when waiting for a site or page to load after clicking on an ad. “Companies assume that when people click that they will land, but they don’t always,” Ding says. To test this, the researchers created real Facebook ads about the benefits of sunscreen. Users who clicked on them were subjected to a 20-second wait for the associated site to load. Animation speeds varied during the wait. Moderate speed outperformed fast animation and a static image, with 45% of participants waiting until landing.
A follow-up study showed that moderate animation speeds led to greater conversion rates when participants were asked to complete a study and encountered a 30-second wait after agreeing. More than two-thirds of the moderate speed group completed the study, versus less than a third in the static condition and half in the fast condition.
The Sweet Spot
Importantly, annoyance over waits carries over to consumers’ evaluations of the products in question. Ding and Kyung showed participants in one study an Amazon-type shopping page for backpacks and were asked to select one. As part of the process, all users faced a 7-second wait before viewing the products they were interested in, then chose a backpack and rated how much they liked it. As expected, people liked their chosen product more if they had seen a moderate-speed animation while waiting.
Ding explains the likely mechanism for the results: “If something is moving too slowly, people just don’t pay attention. There’s nothing to attract their attention. But when it’s moving too fast, like some of the animation in our experiments, it will become a blur, and they just zoom out and look at the general picture. The middle point is the sweet spot.” Ding and Kyung confirmed this by showing that participants performed worse on a math test when watching moderate-speed animations, which captured more of their attention than other conditions.
How can businesses apply these findings? “When we looked at a wide range of websites and apps, we found that many of them just have static images during waits or nothing at all,” Kyung says. “Our work suggests you should do something simple to optimize your digital properties that many firms aren’t doing even now.”
Setting users’ expectations also helps. “But this is risky because you can’t always predict incidental wait times,” Ding says. “If you give some kind of promise — ‘Your wait will be five seconds’ — it can backfire if it’s not met.”
In the end, businesses will have to conduct their own experiments to see what works. “They know their context best,” Ding says. “It’s not that waiting some specific number of milliseconds is best. It’s case by case, and businesses should run tests to see what leads to the outcomes that matter most to them.”
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