Client: That loading screen is going by too fast. The customer can‘t read the slightly too long text. Add 2 more seconds to the load time.

Is this real life?

Or is this just fantasy?

@M1sf3t No escape from reality

@Alice yeah, I mean, I see the reasoning. When you‘re doing something completely client side, you might want to make it look more sophisticated by introducing some minor delay. But artificially increasing response time in addition to the potentionally varying time actual API calls will take? That‘s just insane.

@M1sf3t look up to the skies and see

@irene it‘s not something that signifcant. It’s your typical „wait while we get some results“ message. Jee, thanks for these extra seconds so I may take that all in.

@irene even if the call to action prior to that literally says „Get results“? Isn‘t it in the interest of user experience to serve said results as fast as possible?

Everytime a client askes me to do something like this, I suggest to put in a continue button instead that the user has to click for the loading screen to disappear and that becomes clickable as soon as everything is loaded.
Optionally, the button can autoclick itself after a visible countdown.

MAMAAAA, I KILLED A CLIENT

Depends if they *need* to read the text or not. If it's a legal piece of text, then yes, it needs to be shown for longer. If it's just a crap loading gif of a cat then no, just scrap it.

The "correct" fix in the former case however would be to ensure the loading screen remains visible for at least x seconds, rather than just adding 2 seconds onto whatever the loading time happens to be.

I did same for the splash screen in react native app.

The solution for text in loading screens disappearung too quickly is not increasing the loading time.
The solution is not putting text into loading screens in the first place.

@Lensflare exactly

If I am not wrong this falls under UX so its a reasonable request.

@dneustadt Well you could easily do the math here, test yourself or tell some friend with age same or closer to the average user's age to read that text and set that amount as threshold, then calculate the time it takes to process and finish the api request and then:

(apiTime > threshold ? showLonger : hideSpinner)

@echonox If you wanna go over the top, you could have a "proceed" button after the loading screen is done, such as to give the user a choice. Now we do that for a couple of weeks, and with the data that we gained we train a model that estimates the approximate time each user needs to read the loading screen. Voila, smart phone be smart

I can‘t believe this turned into a discussion about the nature of text on a loading screen. Sure, let‘s disregard any advancements in optimization of response time, trying to shave of every bit of a second. A single person in those comments actually questioned whether there should be text at all rather than choking the app.

@Nanos what the hell? Who *doesn't* press a doorbell? Is it camouflaged or something?

@Nanos

Next step: remove front door, it's just boilerplate anyway

I always program in a default wait time when doing loading. It keeps the user calm, when they have a chance of reading the messages and things doesn't happen to fast.

And I keep it in a variable, to spped up or slow down the site with ease 😅