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Are there any studies or published de-facto standards on how fast the slides of a carousel should change on the homepage of a website?

Here are some examples of sites that incorporate carousels at varying speeds:

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See Are carousels effective? – msanford Oct 23 '12 at 18:12
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Are you talking about the time taken for the transition, or the time between transitions? – Jimmy Breck-McKye Oct 23 '12 at 18:45
I was talking about the time between transitions; but I would be interested to hear about the transition times themselves if there is any data on that @JimmyBreck-McKye! – Andrew Odri Oct 23 '12 at 19:00

6 Answers

up vote 4 down vote accepted

@Denis is quite correct. The only thing I'd add is that a simple way to see what speed you should rotate is to read all the content on each panel out loud (because this forces you not to go too fast), and time how long that takes. Add a little time, and set that as your speed. EDIT @Rob suggests in the comments below that you take 2.5 times the "read-aloud" time, based on guidelines from TV/movie credits and the like.

I find it very irritating when I'm half way through reading something and it flips. And I'm not an especially slow reader! But I do sometimes get distracted looking at something else for a second or two. If in doubt, slow it down.

You can always add an explicit control to move on if needs be.

All that said, @msanford's comment is a very apt one. I'm far from convinced that carousels are an effective way to present information.

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That is an excellent suggestion; read the slide out aloud, and allow for some buffer to time to perhaps soak in the image too. We have explicit controls in place; I feel that is a UX necessity for the user to have control over the content they see. For now we have to work within our clients constraints, until we can do some A:B testing and give them some hard data about what is more effective. Thanks for great suggestion, we will apply that :) – Andrew Odri Oct 24 '12 at 17:32
I have a background in film and TV. The time for credits, captions, and anything that needs to be read on the screen was 2 1/2 times what it took to read it out loud, iirc. – Rob Nov 3 '12 at 11:40
Thanks Rob, that's really useful, I'll edit the answer to include that. – Peter Bagnall Nov 3 '12 at 11:44
up vote 4 down vote

Honestly it varies depending on how much information you have to display. Oracle's carousel displays a lot of it so ~12 seconds works for them. Hopefully that gives you an idea.

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Yeah, that makes a lot of sense; thanks :) – Andrew Odri Oct 23 '12 at 22:22
Anytime, hopefully you were able to solve this ? – Denis Kabistan Oct 28 '12 at 12:24
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The amount of content on the slide and how it is placed (direction and orientation) And the amount of time required by the reader to get the message absorbed. May hint to the right time.

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Could you add some specificity to your answer? This is very vague and doesn't actually address the question. – dhmholley Oct 24 '12 at 8:06
up vote 2 down vote

I'd also think long and hard about whether a carousel is the right option for what you're trying to do.

It's one of those patterns that seems to crop up a lot these days. I've yet to see them work as expected in any usability test I've done. The vast majority of users will a) not see anything past the first entry, and b) find the motion annoyingly distracting when they're trying to read stuff elsewhere on the page.

The "real" right option might be an infinite pause, or multiple pages, or a long copy page, or killing content, or something else...

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I know exactly what you are trying to say; but as always we have to work within our client's constraints for now. For now we have to make the most of a potentially bad situation, but we will try to get some A:B testing going as soon as the client is comfortable :) Thanks for the suggestions! – Andrew Odri Oct 24 '12 at 17:27
up vote 5 down vote

just as a side note be sure to stop the transition when the user hovers the banner

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+1 very good point, often overlooked and annoying – greenforest Oct 26 '12 at 10:57
up vote 0 down vote

Good article, may shed some light on whether an image slider is suitable or not.

Dont use automatic image sliders or carousels ignore the fad

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Thanks for the link. You might want to add it to the question on carousel effectiveness: ux.stackexchange.com/questions/10312/are-carousels-effective (as a comment, or as an answer with some helpful quotes/extracts from the link source) – greenforest Oct 26 '12 at 10:56

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