The Sneaky Psychology Of Loading Screens

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🖖 Hey! I'm Enrico and I am a Product Manager working in tech. On this channel I go behind the scenes of the design, psychology and stories behind technology and the products we use everyday.

In this video we go through the rabbit hole of loading screen design, exploring the evolution that they had overtime: from progress bars to spinning wheels to skeleton loaders. This video has been terrible for my health because now I overanalyze the loading patterns of everything I use. You've been warned.

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[geniferteal]

Mirrors in elevators are also for claustrophobic people. It can be less panicky when the space feels bigger. Also before you enter you can more easily scan the room and see that no one is hiding. This makes them safer. Checking yourself out is great when you're alone probably much less likely in a crowded elevator. Even one other person would make me more self-conscious.

[rsiow]

There's a story of how Singapore dealt with elevator wait times for their earliest public housing designs back in the 70s. Elevators weren't as quick as they are today so people complained about wait times. On top of that, the elevators only stopped every 3 floors above/below, further increasing waiting. In order not to blow out the government budgets, they came up with a clever solution: mirrors. The government quietly installed mirrors next to the elevator doors and complaints more or less stopped. People were using the wait times to check themselves out instead, taking their minds away from the issue.

[deusprogrammer_thekingofspace]

Developer here. It's not really to trick you. It's more just to show you that something is happening. If we didn't put an interstitial in, the user would assume that the application has crashed as they wouldn't be sure something happened.

[ObamaoZedong]

I just miss the old loading bar. I'd rather know how much time I have to wait than a fancy loading animation.

[ianbelletti]

It's funny how old web pages loaded naturally in a modular way, then some companies got the idea to use the spinning wheel to make it appear like it's all loading at once and now, they're like, "Nah! Modular loading was the right way to go to begin with." The spinning wheel is useful for some things to show that the computer is doing something behind the scenes but for most websites modular loading is the way to go because showing each individual element loading in is much more useful than a random loading graphic.

[XGames-]

To me, skeleton loadings work by tricking the brain to think part of the page has already loaded and it won't take long till the complete page appears. I would compare it to texture streaming, when the gameplay starts but the textures haven't fully loaded yet, but you are already playing.

[antoneeee]

AR glasses would be such dystopia. imagine your view getting crowded with shit. now imagine companies trying to put ads in it.

[AspectClip]

Opera Presto (pre-2013 Opera) did this best. They had a unique way of loading webpages that allowed you to interact even before the CSS loaded. This was incredibly helpful on sub-1Mb/s connections back in the 2000's.

[DDouglashey]

WOW man, I clicked on this video and as i watching i was thinking "damn this video is so well edited, this guy had at lest 1milion subscribers"  I was shocked when i saw that you have 900... Good work and thanks!

[furinick]

That's why i love games with loading screen tips that you can parse through, or even where it hastily loads you into something you can interact with while the real level is being loaded

Tf2 has tips and loading screens show you your statistics

Bayonetta loaded you into an empty world, prompted you to do a certain combo, but you could also just do whatever

Not a loading screen but the google dinosaur game is a nice distraction while you try to fix or wait for the issue to get fixed

I think the web should learn from this a little, maybe load some headlines or cool facts, nice interactive animations, maybe even just do some randomly generated things with the skeleton loadeds, like generating random pixel art for thumbnails so people have something to look at or placeholder images

There's a lot of possibilities for small payload sizes, maybe I'll take a crack at making some loading screens in the ol vanilla js and css

[stagespectre]

My roommate was attending art school for graphic design online and it took a LONG time for his projects to load due to the file sizes. So, we spent that time staring at the blank slate gray software workspace anxious to see and share (and critique). We jokingly refered to that time as cleansing our 'visual palette' before the spectacle.

[theredstonehive]

Just like how it would feel better to take a detour instead of waiting in extremely slow traffic for the same amount of time.

[darsterz]

i'll never forget the old youtube spinning wheel where you could press an arrow key and suddenly play snake

[Usith]

I’m getting obsessed with your channel! This stuff is so good

[OcteractSG]

One set of loading screens I really liked is from the Ratchet and Clank games for the PlayStation2. Rather than looking at spinning circles or progress bars, you just watched Ratchet and Clank fly to their next destination, masking the fact that you’re even looking at a loading screen.

[rossimarti]

As an app development lead myself, I encourage all sorts of "tricks" (data compression, caching, delta updates, lazy-loading, AI/prefetching, sprites, "skeletons" that are actually compiled static screenshots, publisher/subscriber models, CDN, redundancy, geolocalization, data bus, on-device data manipulation, sockets, and more), to make data loading appear immediate, as often as possible, as many times as possible. It's a balancing act along with good design. Low overhead for any operation is the name of the game.

[SendyTheEndless]

5:18 I literally got a flashback from this to the other night when I was watching youtube in bed and my internet went out for half an hour. I shuddered at those grey boxes just a tiny bit inside, lol

[edwardperkins]

I hate any loading icons that don't give a time/ fractional visual estimate. As far as anyone knows the thing is animating, but no one knows if it's going to progress or finish. The circle visually implies it might be finished in one revolution, but you know that's wrong.

[davidemodena]

Maybe one of the best content in YouTube so far in 2022

[coding]

Your channel is absolutely amazing! 100% gonna skyrocket to like 100k subs in the month or so with content like this