897: Making Your App Feel Faster Than It Really Is
Syntax - Tasty Web Development Treats
Wes Bos
4.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 28 April 2025
⏱️ 35 minutes
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Summary
Scott and Wes break down the tricks and techniques for making your app feel blazing fast—even when it’s not. From optimistic UI to preload-on-hover, it’s all about perception, not just performance.
Show Notes
- 00:00 Welcome to Syntax!
- 01:12 Brought to you by Sentry.io.
- 02:34 Mousedown or pointerdown events.
- 06:00 UI animations should be fast.
- 08:00 Animations should not block interaction.
- 08:20 Animations should be cancellable / reversible.
- 10:50 Optimistic UI.
- 12:37 Local Data.
- 13:36 Delay loading indicators.
- 14:40 Page loading indicators.
- 15:47 Preload on hover.
- 17:13 Calculate mouse trajectory.
- 18:51 Full page spinner on every change.
- 20:04 Pixelated spinners.
- 20:23 Skeleton loaders.
- 23:43 Photo frames.
- 25:52 Search on input instead of search on click.
- 26:46 Progress loaders than move in between steps.
- 27:31 Community submissions.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to syntax. Today we're talking about how to make your app feel faster than it actually is. |
| 0:06.2 | So we're talking UI improvements, little tips and tricks that you can do to make your app feel faster. |
| 0:14.2 | There's certainly we've talked about how to actually make your website faster. |
| 0:18.0 | We've talked about that quite a bit, but perceived speed is actually really |
| 0:23.1 | important when you're talking about UI and talking about performance. So we're going to go through |
| 0:27.5 | a whole list of things you can do to improve the perceived speed of your website. Welcome, Scott. |
| 0:33.9 | What's up? Hey, I got to say, if your website feels faster, doesn't that mean it's actually faster? |
| 0:43.0 | You know, because like, that's what, I mean, we can measure numbers and whatever that it took this amount of time to load. |
| 0:49.5 | Yeah. |
| 0:50.1 | Like, isn't it all about how it feels? I think it's all about how it feels. That's, that's where I'm at. Yeah. Well, like, if it is about how it feels i think it's all about how it feels that's that's where i'm at |
| 0:55.4 | yeah well like if it is faster it feels faster but if it's the same speed but it feels faster |
| 1:01.5 | it's faster it's faster they're both to be these are both two two sides of the same coin and |
| 1:08.7 | i think they're both valuable techniques to have in your tool belt. |
| 1:12.6 | You know what else is a valuable tool and your tool belt is Century because Century |
| 1:16.7 | does more than just tell you if your application is broken. It also tells you if your application |
| 1:22.4 | is slow or if it feels slow because you get all kinds of insights in terms of being able to see just how |
| 1:29.9 | fast your app is at any given point. You can assess the user misery score for just how fast or slow |
| 1:37.0 | this thing is for the majority of users. And it gives you a nice little user misery bar to say, |
| 1:41.7 | hey, these are the pages on your site that are slow and |
| 1:46.4 | potentially have a lot of traffic. So this is what you should be looking at. And then you can |
| 1:51.0 | further dive into, all right, well, what exactly is taking so long to load on these pages? What are, |
| 1:57.5 | what are the things? What are the aspects? What do I even start? Are there errors? |
... |
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