Fake it 'til you load it: User Perceptions and Performance with Fast-Loading “False Front” Web Pages

Long page-load time for web applications is a common frustration for users – and despite substantial advances in web infrastructure, pages still regularly take more than a second to load. A potential solution to this problem is to show users a “false front” page that looks like the website (and loads quickly), and then switch to the real page once it has arrived. False front pages quickly show users the visual appearance of the page – but because they have not yet loaded the code for interaction, they may cause problems when users try to click on items or manipulate the interface. To provide a better understanding of how users perceive and perform with false-front pages, we developed a framework that specifies potential architectures and designs for several types of false front pages. Our false-front mechanism shows a realistic-looking version of a web application and allows users to “click ahead” before the full page has loaded (feedback shows users their click has been received, and clicks are queued for execution when the application becomes available). We provide details on how the different architectures can be implemented, and discuss two reference implementations that we have constructed. We carried out two crowdsourced studies that compared our false front pages to traditional representations of loading (an animated spinner and a skeleton screen), to see whether users were confused or frustrated by the false fronts, and to see how they perceived the pages’ loading time and responsiveness. Our results showed that false fronts led to better ratings of responsiveness and speed, faster task completion, and higher preference – suggesting that early loading of false fronts is a promising avenue to improve user experience with web applications.