4 Tricks: How to Make App Load Times Feel Faster 4 Tricks: How to Make App Load Times Feel Faster
Review: 4- 5 5 4 Tricks: How to Make App Load Times Feel Faster

4 Tricks: How to Make App Load Times Feel Faster

Rating
Tools
11 Feb 2024
11 min read
Update:

No matter how well-designed your user interface may be, at some point people using it are going to have to wait for something to load. You might wonder, “Then, how to make an app load feel faster?”

Sometimes faster loading time is out of the question, but you can reduce the negative feeling by using a few tricks to make time fly by. Our team created this article with answers to all the questions. Stay tuned!

Why do you need to create a feeling of faster loading?

The loading time can harm the overall user experience. Making users wait too long for your app to load can lead to impatience. If users feel this way, they will likely abandon your site in favor of another. 

Fortunately, there are a few loading UX tips you can use to speed up users’ sense of time and make them feel like your content loads faster than it does.

How to make an app load feel faster — 4 main tricks

In today’s digital-first world, user experience can make or break an app. As developers and designers, it’s our job to not only ensure our apps run smoothly but also to keep users engaged, even when they’re waiting. Long website loading times are a common challenge, but fear not — there are clever ways how to make an app load feel faster, enhancing user satisfaction without having to change the core mechanics. 

This section delves into how to design better progress loading indicators among other strategies, offering four main tricks to keep your users content and engaged, even as the wheel of progress spins. Let’s explore these ingenious approaches that can transform waiting time from a user experience pitfall into an opportunity for engagement.

1. Never make users wait without giving them feedback

If the user’s connection is slow, populating content on the screen can take some time. The user’s wait time begins the moment they initiate an action, and it’s particularly frustrating when they don’t have any indicator that the site has received their action.

When your site fails to notify users that it needs some time to complete an action, users often assume it didn’t receive the request, and try the action again. This misunderstanding can lead to plenty of extra taps due to a lack of feedback. To enhance user satisfaction, it’s crucial to indicate that the site is processing the request, through visual feedback.

2. Avoid static progress indicators

Static progress indicators are the ones that display an unchanging image or text, such as “Loading…” or “Please wait…” to indicate that the request has been received. 

While any feedback is better than none, static indicators constitute poo UX design. Since these indicators do not change,  users don’t know whether content is being loaded, so they aren’t sure if the process has stalled or not.

3. Use animated loading indicators

Psychological studies on waiting times have revealed that user focus starts to shift after one second of waiting without any feedback. To reduce a user’s uncertainty, we advise using a progress indicator for any action that takes longer than that. 

Note: the use of loading animation isn’t recommended for anything that takes less than one second to load. It’s because users might feel anxious about what just flashed on the screen.

  • Infinite loading spinners for reasonably fast operations

The simplest form of animated indicators is a loading spinner. This type of visual feedback just states that the user has to wait, but doesn’t specify how long the wait will be. You might be wondering when to show a loading spinner. As a general rule, you should use this type of progress indicator for relatively quick actions (2–10 seconds).

how to make an app load feel faster - spinners

Loading spinners are often used together with the pull-to-refresh gesture. They act as an intermediary between the two UI states, helping users to understand what happens when the screen changes.

4 Tricks: How to Make App Load Times Feel Faster 2

  • Percent-done animation for long-lasting operations

Loading spinners isn’t the perfect way to indicate long-lasting loading. It’s much more bearable for users to wait for something when they have an idea of when the waiting will end. 

That’s why for long-lasting operations, you should provide your users with a clear indication of how long they need to wait. As a general rule of thumb, you should use a percent-done animation for longer processes that take 10 seconds or more. It’s an effective method of how to feel apps load faster.

how to make an app load feel faster - percentage

Alternatively, offering a general time estimate for the completion of the operation can also be effective. There’s no need to strive for precision, a simple notification such as, “This might take a minute” can be enough to inform the user and encourage them to wait.

4. Tweaking the user’s perception of time

The speed at which your content loads significantly impacts the user’s perception of your website or app. When trying to create a faster user experience, you can focus on shortening the perceived time rather than the actual loading time. To do so, you can engage users during waiting times with content, animations, or interactive actions.

  • Progress bars

Progress bars play an important role in shaping user expectations about the loading speed of a process. The way your progress bar moves affects how they perceive the page load time. To make a progress bar feel faster to users, you can consider the following simple techniques:

  1. Continuous movement: Make sure the progress bar doesn’t stop suddenly, otherwise, users will think the site froze. The worst-case scenario is when the progress bar approaches 99% and suddenly freezes near the completion. Most users will be frustrated by this behavior.
  2. Manage delays smartly: Small delays in the progress can be masked by initiating the progress bar’s movement instantly and maintaining a steady pace. This helps avoid user perception of initial sluggishness.
  3. Varying speed: Move the progress bar slowly in the beginning and accelerate it towards the end to give users a rapid sense of completion time.

how to make an app load feel faster - progress bars

  • Skeleton screens

Wait time offers a great opportunity to use skeleton screens (a.k.a. temporary information containers). A skeleton screen is essentially a placeholder version of a page into which information is progressively loaded. It provides an alternative to the traditionally animated indicators. 

Instead of showing an abstract widget, skeleton screens build anticipation for the upcoming content and shift users’ focus from the wait times to the loading progress.

Skeleton images are advantageous because they load quickly, often consisting of simple shapes that require minimal data. This technique can be taken even further in mobile apps, answering the question of how to make an app load feel faster on Android or IOS. It’s because the skeleton template can be stored locally together with the app’s data, further reducing load times. 

For example, Facebook’s app for iOS shows users gray blocks and lines to represent images and text as the app loads. Once loading is completed, the actual images and text replace the temporary placeholders. This is technically no faster than having a loading screen with a spinner, but in the user’s mind, it seems to be.

how to make an app load feel faster - skeleton screens

  • Background operations

Another speed trick you can use is background operations. Integrating actions into background processes offers two key benefits: they are invisible to the user and occur before the user actually requests them. This strategy allows users to focus on other things as a process is going on in the background. 

A good example of this is uploading pictures on Instagram. When a user selects a picture to share, the upload process begins immediately. The app prompts users to add captions and tags while the picture is being uploaded in the background. By the time users are ready to hit the ‘Share’ button, the upload is already completed, enabling instantaneous sharing of their picture.

This seamless integration of background operations not only improves the user experience by making it appear faster but also increases overall user satisfaction by eliminating unnecessary waiting.

  • Progressive image loading

As modern apps and sites load more and more images, considering how these images load is crucial for both performance and user experience. Using a blur effect to create a progressive image-loading effect is a good strategy to improve the perceived speed of content delivery. Medium serves as an excellent example of this approach in action. The platform blurs the post image cover as well as images within the post content until they are fully loaded. 

First, it loads a small blurry image (thumbnail) and then transitions to a full-sized, high-resolution image. The thumbnails are very small (just a few kilobytes), making them quick to load. So, the use of a blurry effect allows for a better placeholder than a solid color, without sacrificing payload.

how to make an app load feel faster - 4 tricks

  • Visual distraction

You should always try to make the wait more pleasant if you can’t reduce the wait time. To ensure people don’t get bored or frustrated while waiting for content to load or an action to complete, offer them some distraction. Fine animations can distract your visitors and make them less aware of long loading times.

how to make an app load feel faster - 4 tricks
4 Tricks: How to Make App Load Times Feel Faster 3

 

Making load times feel faster is just half of the battle. Explore the best practices for web design to learn how to keep users on your site as long as possible!

So, how to make an app load feel faster?

The key to enhancing user satisfaction in the face of inevitable loading times lies not just in attempting to speed up these intervals, but in skillfully managing users’ perception of time. By implementing engaging feedback mechanisms, such as animated indicators, progress bars, skeleton screens, and background operations, developers can make users feel the app loads faster. 

Ultimately, the art of making wait times feel shorter is a component of creating a user-friendly digital environment, ensuring users remain content and engaged, even when faced with the unavoidable aspect of waiting. Turn to skilled UI designers, and rest assured that your site will be loved by all your visitors. 

If you have any questions about UI/UX for your website, don’t hesitate to contact us. We’re here to assist and guide you in enhancing your digital platform’s user experience!

FAQ

How can I make an app load feel faster?

You can try different techniques to make a page load feel faster, such as percent-done animations, progress bars, skeleton screens, background operations, etc.

Does page speed affect SEO?

Yes, page speed is a ranking factor for SEO, affecting user experience and potentially your site’s position in search results.

What affects page loading time?

Page loading time is affected by several factors, including file sizes, web page design, hosting server performance, volume of traffic, code efficiency, plugins/widgets, and a lot of other factors.

How do I make a picture load faster?

There are a few things to help you with faster picture loading: compress the image, reduce its dimensions to fit the display size, and use modern, efficient formats like WebP.

What is a good average page load time?

The generally accepted target for a good average page load time is under 3 seconds (ideally 0-2 seconds). However, faster is always better, especially considering the high user expectations.

Got a project in mind?

Reach out to us at Fireart, and we'll help you bring it to life

Your name
Email
Message

Our Clients

Over 200 brands have built their products with us at Fireart. Yours might be next!

Rolls-Royce
Limehome
Just Eat
FREE NOW
Bolt
TheoremReach
Pipedrive
Back Office
Toggle
Google
Atlassian
ByNext
Swisscom
JAM
dots