How to Speed Up Your UX with Skeleton Screens

However well-designed your user interface may be, at some point or other, the people using it are going to have to wait for something to load.

To make people happy, we need to give an indication that something is happening. This leaves us with three basic options:

• progress bar if we can measure the duration;
• spinner if we can’t; and
• nothing at all.

Psychological studies into progress indicators show that our interpretation of them is anything but linear. Our method of processing a delay doesn’t match up with reality.

Understanding this concept leads us into the realm of manipulating interfaces in order to improve perception.

In software design, skeleton screens provide an alternative to the traditional methods. Rather than show an abstract widget, skeleton screens create anticipation of what is to come and reduce cognitive load.