Loading screens are indirect speakers of your product

Sometimes (rarely) a longer loading time can be good user experience. But if those extra seconds aren’t intentional and have’t been proven to improve the user experience then they’re probably killing conversions of your product and frustrating your users.

But at some point, users will have to wait for something in your product to load. How you handle that waiting experience can make a huge difference to your users (and your retention rates).

Some products have found a way to make waiting more bearable by utilising their loading pages to add value to the overall user experience. While often treated as an afterthought in product design, the loading page is an important indication to your users that their patience matters.

Because while we are making an user wait, we are indirectly testing their patience.

So why not reward them for this?

Now I am wondering, how long users can wait and look at above screens?

Skeleton screens, animation, lazy loading and other loading design patterns help keep users engaged. But when delays are unavoidable (for e.g. your product maintenance page), even these trendy design patterns or screens can make a bad user experience.

So let’s make it fun.

When we have long waiting time, best way to engage users is to engage them mentally and physically and we can do this by adding few games to make it more fun. Because when done well, loading pages can reinforce your brand, boost user motivation, and delight users.

You can find such collection of open source web games on GitHub. Hanisha Arora, Sanjeev Kumar and I as a product team picked these games from here for our product.

Ultimately, you should be focused on optimising your product to become leaner, faster, and quicker to load.

But in the meantime, a friendly hextris won’t hurt.