Strategies for Enhancing React Application Performance: Balancing Efficiency and User Experience

I was intending to write a post, but I found myself writing an article instead, as I couldn't control the flow of my thoughts.

We talk about performance enhancement in React applications for smooth and uninterrupted end-user experience.

Certainly, we can implement many strategies such as improving our logic, data structures, design patterns, and reducing rendering through memoization, or others.

However, there are limitations. Let's consider a scenario where we are utilizing a REST API with response time of around 500ms or more. Due to heavy operations or involvement of multiple services, we may still experience delays.

To enhance the user experience, we can utilize loaders and allow users to perform other tasks without blocking the UI.

There are two types of people - technical and non-technical. Fortunately, when designing and developing applications, the end-users are often non-technical.

We can leverage human nature, behavior, and the user experience.

What I'm trying to convey is that it's not always crucial for your application to excel in performance metrics. Instead, it should hypothetically appear performant.

For instance, there's a React hook called "useDeferredValue," which initially renders the component with the previous value and then renders it again with the updated value. Utilizing a Suspense boundary, it won't display a loader but will instead show existing data. This can be utilized to change the content's color to indicate that it's stale and in the process of updating.

Many of us prefer not to encounter an infinite loader. Rather, displaying stale data can give users the impression that it's outdated and about to be updated.

You might not fully agree with me, but this aligns with human nature and is likely to resonate with most users.

Therefore, I'm trying to convey that for large applications with numerous end-users, what's important is whether it appears efficient, regardless of what's happening behind the scenes.