The effect of skeleton screens: Users' perception of speed and ease of navigation

Progression bars and spinners have long been the norm when providing feedback during wait times on the web. However, a more recent trend is the use of skeleton screens. This paper aims to evaluate the usefulness of skeleton screens as an alternative to spinners. This is done user testing a fictional news site with two variations, one showing skeleton screens before content is loaded, and another utilizing spinners. Both a questionnaire and measuring timing while finding a specified article when entering a website for the first time was used. The results show that the page using skeleton screens, scored higher on average on both perceived speed and ease of navigation. However, people using the page with spinners were faster at finding the article when entering the site for the first time. The results of this paper cannot show any significant differences in any of the comparisons between the web pages.