I’m not sure what it is but I really enjoy watching things get uploaded… you know the bar that shows you the progress of where your upload is. The first time it was used was in Mosaic to indicate to their users “Hey, don’t give up on me. We are loading the webpage.”

We’ve come a long way since Mosaic. I wanted to take a look at things other sites do while the website is in a loading state.

YouTube Leverages Loading Time to Get SEO Juice

That is why I thought it was pretty brilliant to see how YouTube leverages their loading time to get you to add a description, tags, and categorize your video. By the time your video is fully uploaded you probably already entered in all your information.

HipMunk Shows Me Tips

Gmail knows its slow so they show me a preview of my email with a loading bar

If You Have To Fake It

If you don’t have the time to add in something cool. Please make sure you add a progress bar (if you have to, fake it by estimating the average time and having a bar load for that long) or something that shows some progress. If you don’t have one I’m going to think the upload failed and move on.

What if I don’t have any loading time?

Then… you win! Nobody likes loading time. Google has reported that if the search results take longer than 3 seconds they see a significant drop off in user engagement, which is why they limit the first page to 10 results.