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interactions@Ibelick

Prefer Skeletons Over Spinners

SHOULD

SHOULD: Use structural skeletons for loading states instead of spinners. Skeletons show content shape, reduce perceived wait time, and prevent layout shift.

Use skeleton placeholders instead of spinners for loading states to reduce perceived load time

Bad

Good

Why it matters

The load-bearing word upstream is *structural*: a skeleton earns its keep by mirroring the shape of the content that is about to arrive, which reserves the layout and cuts perceived wait. A generic shimmering block is just a spinner with extra steps. This is a SHOULD, not a MUST — a spinner is still fine for a short, unpredictable wait with no known shape.

References

Built by Gleb Stroganov, design engineer at Evil Martians.

The rules come from other people's skills and guidelines — Vercel, Rauno Freiberg, @Ibelick, impeccable, Emil Kowalski, Tailwind, RAMS — each one credited on the Sources page. The work here is extraction and wiring: every rule is pulled into one corpus, given a good and a bad example you can operate, a MUST/SHOULD/NEVER rule an agent can paste, and a link back to where it came from.