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PleaseWait.js – Show your users a beautiful loading page while your app loads

pathgather.github.io

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Re: PleaseWait.js – Show your users a beautiful loading page while your app loads

#11

Post by adnanh »

mindcrime wrote: post #2

Is it just me, or does anybody else think that it's a problem that the world even needs this in the first place? I expect splash screens and slightly longer load times from desktop apps... if I click on a link to something in my browser, not so much. TBH, if a page/app takes more than a second or two to load, I assume there's something wrong with it (or my net connection).

Some (legacy?) web applications written in flash (using Flex SDK for example) still require some time to download, considering that the binary of 2mb takes at least a few seconds to download, showing a splash screen to a user instead of the blank page would be much better than having user to wonder if the page/app is going to load at all, like in [1].

[1] http://www.socialexplorer.com/6f4cdab7a0/explore

Re: PleaseWait.js – Show your users a beautiful loading page while your app loads

#12

Post by mQu »

xatnys wrote: post #7
mindcrime wrote: post #2

Is it just me, or does anybody else think that it's a problem that the world even needs this in the first place? I expect splash screens and slightly longer load times from desktop apps... if I click on a link to something in my browser, not so much. TBH, if a page/app takes more than a second or two to load, I assume there's something wrong with it (or my net connection).

Certainly, with web applications you would want the least amount of latency possible. This is a normal UX scenario -- as you indicated, there are factors which can simply be out of the hands of the application such as network connectivity. In cases like that, indicating to the user that something is happening makes for a better experience than not doing anything, or in the worst case (which certainly shouldn't happen…

Not realy. A user with a slow connection will know that and wait (because the problem will be global). Adding a preloader is just bloat that will make the site load even longer (and just piss off the user as he'll know that some of his scare bandwith was lost on the shiny spinning wheel).

Re: PleaseWait.js – Show your users a beautiful loading page while your app loads

#13

Post by jhdavids8 »

masukomi wrote: post #10
jhdavids8 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For SPAs, something like this can be quite useful for a few reasons: branding (see Slack's and Asana's cool examples), having in-app authentication on any page (see the login form example on the demo page), and yes, showing some sort of notification while a good bit of data loads in the background. For the majority of sites, I agree this may be overkill, but if you have a SPA that needs to load a good bit of data on…

You missed the point. If you "need to load a good bit of data on the user's first use" you've already failed. I've been coding professionally for about 20 years now and the only reason i've ever seen for loading a bit of data on the initial hit, is that the developer didn't spend the time to think about how to load the necessary pieces incrementally, as they were needed by the user . Instead they designed a system th…

I certainly agree. There are almost always ways to avoid "loading a good bit of data on the user's first use". But for your traditional SPA, it's quite common that you need to make a few AJAX calls to your backend API in order to fetch some data to show to the user. This was built for mostly that case, not for the "let's block the user's screen for 5+ seconds while we do unnecessary data fetches" case.

Edit: I misspoke when I said "a good bit of data" in my original response. I simply meant any API calls to your backend.

Re: PleaseWait.js – Show your users a beautiful loading page while your app loads

#15

Post by zaidf »

mindcrime wrote: post #2

Is it just me, or does anybody else think that it's a problem that the world even needs this in the first place? I expect splash screens and slightly longer load times from desktop apps... if I click on a link to something in my browser, not so much. TBH, if a page/app takes more than a second or two to load, I assume there's something wrong with it (or my net connection).

It's very common for certain features in enterprise apps to take 5-30seconds to load. Most enterprise report generation features require a few seconds for a lot of the queries, for example.

Re: PleaseWait.js – Show your users a beautiful loading page while your app loads

#16

Post by mQu »

jhdavids8 wrote: post #9
mQu wrote: post #6

Why is this any different than Flash preloaders just a moment ago? And even worse - it doesn't show any progress so there isn't any user feedback. Every (bad) pattern seems to repeat itself. Just using current-cool-tech. I would much more appreciate that dev time would be put into a framework that allows graceful enchancement by deferring loading more heavy components and to allow user to interact with the site ASAP.…

Using PleaseWait to actually show progress can be achieved by simply updating the loading HTML to show a number percentage, but we may update the API to make this easier in the future. And I agree that a skeleton project to show proper modularization of different components would be great! Our blog just started an Angular series, so we'll try to write one on how we split up our large Angular enterprise app in this re…

But it's missing the point - just like other comments said - if you need this you're doing it wrong.

I sure was guilty of big sites just as much as the next guy. It just saddens me that insted of promoting what we've learned it the past years and applying to current projects we're doomed to repeat bad UX from before.

Re: PleaseWait.js – Show your users a beautiful loading page while your app loads

#17

Post by ddoolin »

I'll be the odd one out and say that the presentation is actually gorgeous. It's really not a whole lot of extra resources that need to be pulled in to do it, either. You could do it in a few lines of HTML/CSS if you were so inclined.

That said, I will agree that the use case is very small (page opening) and for most these days even showing this for more than 2 or 3 seconds might lead to some wrong assumptions and showing it for only a split second would be odd/no good/etc.

Re: PleaseWait.js – Show your users a beautiful loading page while your app loads

#19

Post by RobertKerans »

ranty wrote: post #4
mindcrime wrote: post #2

Is it just me, or does anybody else think that it's a problem that the world even needs this in the first place? I expect splash screens and slightly longer load times from desktop apps... if I click on a link to something in my browser, not so much. TBH, if a page/app takes more than a second or two to load, I assume there's something wrong with it (or my net connection).

Exactly. Splash screens are so 1995 - we need to be getting users to something useful as fast as possible.

Games fair enough; I understand the temptation, but Jesus, just spit out a static page and load the rest in as and when needed.

Re: PleaseWait.js – Show your users a beautiful loading page while your app loads

#20

Post by at-fates-hands »

masukomi wrote: post #10
jhdavids8 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For SPAs, something like this can be quite useful for a few reasons: branding (see Slack's and Asana's cool examples), having in-app authentication on any page (see the login form example on the demo page), and yes, showing some sort of notification while a good bit of data loads in the background. For the majority of sites, I agree this may be overkill, but if you have a SPA that needs to load a good bit of data on…

You missed the point. If you "need to load a good bit of data on the user's first use" you've already failed. I've been coding professionally for about 20 years now and the only reason i've ever seen for loading a bit of data on the initial hit, is that the developer didn't spend the time to think about how to load the necessary pieces incrementally, as they were needed by the user . Instead they designed a system th…

Agreed.

There's so many tools right now to find out exactly what your page or app is using and how to minimize what you're serving. Sure, it takes some effort, but your users will thank you in the end.

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