We have a bit of a discussion regarding the use of wait/load indicators in a project I am working on.
The scenario:
- A click on an "open document" link possibly leads to a 2-5 second wait before the user can see the document contents.
- Some coworkers are of the opinion that we in this case should display a waiting page with a load indicator right away and then use AJAX to load the document content (all the documents are HTML) into the page.
- My opinion is that since the sole purpose of the click is to display the document, just handle this as a normal page load and let the browser do the wait indication.
Does anyone have any advice? Is there any research that indicates what solution is best?