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Ban the Throbber
- merona_io 2mo agono more throbbing!
- cf100clunk 2mo agoNo more relentless hourglass, no more endless toilet flush, no more spinning beach ball. May they all suffer endless guru meditation.
- Cider9986 2mo agoI don't universally dislike the Throbber, if that's what it's really called. I have incredibly negative memories of the Netflix one, on cheap TVs with poor WiFi, which had a percentage which meant nothing. It's used a lot in Android apps and it stresses me out on occasion when I'm in a rush. Chromium on Android seems to use it well enough when reloading a page. Often it feels like a jagged interruption in the application and like something is broken or out of place.
- drcongo 2mo agoWhy ban the symptom?
- NetMageSCW 2mo agoHow you respond to bad cases is not a symptom.
- perching_aix 2mo agoExplicitly the opposite of what the page is about if you read beyond the title?
- pessimizer 2mo agoThe throbber was the beginning of developers gaslighting users. It began as an indicator during long loads that your system hadn't frozen (because whatever process was running had to update it), and became a useless animation that communicated nothing.
- classichasclass 2mo agoYes, it tells you nothing. It has no relationship to what's going on at the other end, which may well also be nothing.
- ninjalanternshk 2mo agoThere’s at least one distinction I didn’t see in the article. If a throbber is advanced by signals of progress or at least action, then it’s not useless and is arguably better than a progress bar that moves with unpredictable and uneven speed. If a throbber is an animated gif displayed until something makes it go away, then it’s useless.
- ChiperSoft 2mo agoIt tells you that the app is actually doing something and your tap didn't land outside the button.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- fugaziboutit 2mo agoThere's a place for spinners, but I agree in the sense that the average user shouldn't be waiting for a spinner in an average session. A green path should be a good experience. An edge-case user should expect it for expected waits of up to 10 seconds (progress bars for 10sec+ expected waits), because their edge case shouldn't inflict preloading on average users. But ghost loading will make it less annoying in any event, and there should be reasonable timeout error handling.
- ChiperSoft 2mo agojfc, please no, I already have to use too many apps that don't give any feedback while they are waiting for a request to finish. I am so sick of systems that don't account for request latency, especially on mobile. The purpose of the throbber is to tell the user that their tap landed on the right place and the app is actually doing something.