Spinner Guidelines

This component of the Design System is deprecated, which means it'll be replaced or removed soon. Until that, the Design System team will support existing implementations, but please avoid implementing this component in new projects.

Use spinner to inform marketers that the system is retrieving or synchronizing data, that might take undetermined but short time before finishes.

Best practices

Spinners should:

  • Be positioned to indicate where the result of the progress will be placed. Think about it as a placeholder.
  • Have a steady animation so the user knows that something is happening.
  • Be paired with a label next to the indicator that gives extra context.
  • Give a feeling of continuity when multiple data is being processed in a row. To achieve this, provide a spinner one by one sequentially for each piece of data.
  • Be used when the operation falls around these keywords:
  • Fetching...
  • Uploading...
  • Signing in...
  • Connecting...

Try to avoid:

  • Using spinner to indicate a progress which takes a determined length of time to be completed. Use a Progress Bar instead.
  • Unnecessarily restrain marketers while a long computation is taking place. Let them finish other tasks without interrupting the loading. When the process is finished, send them a notification with a link to the affected area.
  • Visually overwhelm the screen by putting multiple spinners in the same content box. As a rule of thumb don’t let the user see more than four spinners on the screen at the same time.
  • Spinners when the operation falls around these keywords:
  • Loading...
  • Retrieving...
  • Installing...

Content guidelines

Spinner labels should:

  • Start with a capital letter.
  • Give extra context if it helps the user understand the situation better.
  • Be short and to the point.
  • Use present continuous form.
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