Products · Pattern or everyday thing
Skeleton screens
Raised as a usability problem by 8 people on Hacker News over 11 years (2015–2025), in 7 threads.
People raised many different problems with Skeleton screens, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 8 complaints
- Skeleton placeholders signal a slow, janky page and make the experience feel worse2025-06-01
- Fake grey placeholder layouts don't match the real page, confusing what is loading2023-08-28
- Empty skeleton screens look like a malfunction rather than loading2023-08-28
- Users associate skeleton loading screens with bad experiences and find them off-putting2022-05-02
- Skeleton placeholders show for seconds while the app is still not usable2022-03-27
- Placeholders animate, then collapse without showing content or handling network errors2021-06-05
- Placeholder gray boxes look janky and feel like waiting through trailers2021-05-28
- Page changes to empty content with no loading indicator, so users can't tell if it's loading or broken2015-11-27