I spent three weeks last January stripping every loading spinner from our product. Not because they were broken — they worked fine. But somewhere around 2019 we had decided that every interaction needed instant feedback, and the result was a patchwork of skeleton screens, optimistic updates, and pre-fetched data that made our app feel like it was trying too hard. The performance numbers looked great on paper. The product itself felt hollow.
What We Removed Changed How We Think
The first thing we brought back was the honest file-upload progress bar — the real one, not the animated stub that jumped to 80% and then stalled. Users told us the truthful bar, even when it was slower, felt more trustworthy. That pattern repeated everywhere. Deliberate pacing, we discovered, signals craftsmanship the way instant gratification never can. Our NPS climbed twelve points in the quarter after we stopped optimizing for milliseconds and started optimizing for moments that matter.