Hypnotise Your Users Whilst They Wait for Content To Load - 031
Howdy marketeers and digital lovers, welcome to?issue?031?of?Swipe & Deploy.
Hope you've had a great week and?are looking forward to the weekend.
Enough of the pleasantries, let's get straight to the good stuff.
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Hypnotise Your Users Whilst They Wait for Content To Load
Loading is inevitable.
As much as you optimise your content and your website the truth is, if the user has a slow connection ultimately there will still be some form of waiting even though faster loading websites may load quicker.
Some websites have complex product customisation tools that take longer to pull data from their databases, this is where in some cases loading does become inevitable.
Waiting kills conversions
The longer a user waits, the less chance the'll reach out or buy. Amazon state that they would lose $1.6 billion dollars per year if their website loads just 1 second slower.
So if loading is inevitable in some cases and users are not likely to hang-around, what's the answer?
Hypnotise or Entertain Them?
Hypnotising them might be a little extreme, but perhaps a way of entertaining or at least presenting a visual way or capturing their attention is surely the answer.
Shimmer or Skeleton Animations
You have no doubt come across shimmer animations before and may not have even noticed because they are a subtle. But it is the fact they are subtle twinned with the fact that something visual is actually happening, which is why they work so well.
A shimmer animation is ultimately a fancy loading or progress indicator, compared to displaying a spinning wheel, the website presents the core skeleton aspects of the website, similar to a low definition wireframe.
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By displaying the 'traced' content elements the user is presented with something more visual whilst they are waiting for the content to load. The slight animated shine effect is what makes it more engaging and indicates that the website is in fact 'doing something'.
Once the content has loaded the outline of skeleton content is replaced with the real content and imagery.
Who's Using It?
So where can you see this in action? Facebook use this when loading content (I actually think they were the first to roll this out and may have even coined the term Shimmer). YouTube and many other heavy content brands.
I actually came across it whilst browsing on the Volvo website, a screenshot of their skeleton layout and here's the link so you can see their car models loading for yourself.
So What's To Swipe & Deploy?
First things first, if your website is slow, then you may want to firstly check that there is nothing that can be achieved to speed things up without introducing loading indicators.
Loading indicators is not the go to solution for slow websites, but should be used to counteract loading times for users with slower connections, to indicate that there is something happening.
If your website already utilises progress indicators, you may want to explore replacing the standard progress or spinning indicators with a shimmer effect.
The main thing to takeaway here is that you want to eradicate blank pages of content. Even presented in short periods of time, a blank screen can appear that something is broken and nothing is happening.
Any type of progress indicator can work well, but a shimmer can capture the user's attention better than the classic spinning loader.
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That's a wrap for Swipe & Deploy 031 this week. Join me next Friday where I will share another insight or inspiration piece from around the web.?
Until next week - have a great weekend.?
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