People are impatient and expect everything on three computer to be as fast as the faster things on it. Anything slow can feel like there is something wrong.
They don't expect things to be instant, but your page turning example is relevant: if losing a new page take the time of a physical page turn or two then it is probably fine and feels smooth. More than a few hundred ms and things feel more "janky". This is something some people cite as why they don't like e-ink devices.
> some SPAs are much harder to navigate because they are over engineered
This is definitely true, but also holds for many non SPA sites too.
> > blank screens
This part of the parent post is significant IMO. If the previous page vanishes I find I'm less patient waiting for the new information. This is worse if there has been a delay before that happens too.
Though likewise if nothing changes I might think something is amiss: did my click even register? Some extra indication of action (the click target changing colour is sufficient) helps here, when the background request doesn't show in the browsers built-in activity indicators.
> People are impatient and expect everything on three computer to be as fast as the faster things on it. Anything slow can feel like there is something wrong.
True, but an SPA doesn't really solve that either. You still have to make a request to the API and wait for it just like you have to wait for some HTML. The only difference is with an SPA you can show a spinner to the user.
Also, on an SPA, the initial hit of JS can be alleviated with code-splitting (if your main chunk is small enough) but when you switch pages you still need to download and parse a new chunk of JS.
An SPA, if properly designed, can help interactive use significantly though, compared to full page reloads. You may pay for the reduction in interactive latency with an upfront loading cost, but when comparing to desktop applications that is often not too bad anyway (Excel doesn't load immediately on most PCs, games of any modern design generally don't either). People are more willing to wait a second or few initially than they are to wait half a second when getting more data from an app that they consider to already be loaded.
The problem is that many are not properly designed. In fact often the patten is often used when it is not really appropriate and a fairly static site would (again with that caveat: if properly designed) be much more efficient and just as user-friendly.
I agree, but it really depends on the context and if it is really properly designed (which takes a lot of effort).
Personally I don't mind waiting a couple of seconds for Gmail to load, but I hate to load that much for Twitter which is also an SPA. Not sure what the psychology is there.
People are impatient and expect everything on three computer to be as fast as the faster things on it. Anything slow can feel like there is something wrong.
They don't expect things to be instant, but your page turning example is relevant: if losing a new page take the time of a physical page turn or two then it is probably fine and feels smooth. More than a few hundred ms and things feel more "janky". This is something some people cite as why they don't like e-ink devices.
> some SPAs are much harder to navigate because they are over engineered
This is definitely true, but also holds for many non SPA sites too.
> > blank screens
This part of the parent post is significant IMO. If the previous page vanishes I find I'm less patient waiting for the new information. This is worse if there has been a delay before that happens too.
Though likewise if nothing changes I might think something is amiss: did my click even register? Some extra indication of action (the click target changing colour is sufficient) helps here, when the background request doesn't show in the browsers built-in activity indicators.