Spinner or progress bar: How to keep your users engaged during wait

Loading Spinner is one of the most used wait indicators in the user interface design. But it has its own flaws which the user interface designers generally miss. Many designers have a habit of using spinners for all the waiting indications. But when you use spinners for long processes, you are sure to disappoint your users. Spinners don’t tell users how long the process might take to complete. If you use it for long waits, users can end up wondering if the app is hanging and may kill it. Instead I recommend using progress bars if the load or processing time is more than 10 seconds.

Progress bars make longer processes predictable. Users don’t mind waiting if they know that progress is being made in the background. Your content might not take much time to load. But it may appear longer with spinners. If the processing time is more than one minute, you should show them an estimated time remaining along with the progress bar. This adds predictability to the wait.

If you want users to stay in your app, don’t use spinners for wait times more than 10 seconds.

Based on the research done by the Jakob Nielsen’s “10 seconds: Limit for users keeping their attention on the task. Anything slower than 10 seconds needs a percent-done indicator as well as a visible way for the user to interrupt the operation.”

You should use a progress bar if the processing or loading takes longer than 10 seconds. As a general rule of thumb you should use a percent-done animation for longer processes.

Always keep user informed about the progress in background activity and you will keep them engaged. You may also add animated progress indicator to make the wait a little more bearable.

This article is a part of series of articles related to Design Thinking and User Experiences from our user interface design experts. If you are looking for a User experience team to design your solution, please contact us at info@47billion.com.