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Discussion on: Speed Up Your UX with Skeleton Loading ☠️

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Rasmus Schultz

At the risk of sounding poignant... in my opinion, skeleton loaders are either:

  1. Frustrating (or confusing) because loading takes too long, or
  2. Unnecessary, because loading is fast and you barely notice it anyhow.

For example, Netflix often takes way too long to load, and I find it obnoxious - having to watch a screen full of shimmering boxes feels like a cheap trick to keep me transfixed during the wait.

It's also a lot of complexity (lots of extra CSS to maintain) to communicate something as trivial as "please wait", which can be just as (or more) clearly communicated with a single, conventional, spinning element in the center of the screen.

Sorry, but that's just my honest point of view... If you want your app to feel fast, invest your time in optimizations and make it fast - instead of investing deeper into your performance problem itself, just to cover it up.

I know that these skeleton loaders are trendy, but I still feel like they're symptomatic - and, on top of that, I don't feel like they honestly address the problem.

Just my two cents. 🙂