Page preloaders: My Thoughts

It’s no mystery why the adoption of AJAX and JS effects on sites have been so popular, but are some sites overdoing it?  Today I ran into a very good example of what I personally believe to be too AJAX’d.  I think it’s great when people use it sparingly to enhance usability, but what if it starts to hinder your websites usability and disrupts the typical response you would expect from a webpage loading.  I ran into a very interesting example today: Motorola.com.

Here are some gripes that I had when visiting the website:
1.  Loading pages should be quick
Motorola did an amazing job at hiding the fact that the website was loading the background by showing a rotating circle gif image.  Wait, that’s not a good thing, how am I supposed to be able to tell what elements of the site are loading?  I admit, this is totally a personal disposition on this subject, but I really felt like the website was just acting slow.  Instead of the typical DOM loading sequence where you get to watch the page being built in front of your eyes, the website hides everything with a full page DIV and centers the loading image.  There’s no progress bar, no status, just a circular loader.  Yes, I am aware browsers show loader bars either in the bottom or top of your browser, but there’s just something different about displaying elements building on a page that will trigger a user’s sense of speed.  People love to watch progress, and when you hide it, you only give the impression that your site is loading slower than it should be, unless your site loads in half a millisecond (not everyone can be Google though).

2.  Let’s talk about applications
So Motorola finally implemented a Motorola Phone comparison system and it looks pretty slick.  The only problem I had was using this system.  No, there were no bugs, and the animation frameworks used were a mix of Mootools and some custom written JS.  What are my gripes?  Animation speed.  Everything was just a bit sluggish.  I typically find myself setting any animation duration to roughly around half a second.  Again, this is subjective, but let’s face it, I don’t think any large scale web application is making sure users feel the animation.  If it doesn’t help the process, take it out.

3.  Bandwidth
It feels like Motorola expected everyone to be on a 10mbit connection, but having a homepage of around 2.6mb just baffles me especially when it’s not a pure Flash website.  I guess it’s just a combination of large page download as well as masking the website while it’s loading.  Just a bad combo in general.

What are your thoughts?