Outstanding Angular User Experience; Here Is How

AngularJS is used for building web applications and what matters the most for web applications is its performance and user experience. Issues like slow loading time, poor user journey, lacking visual design, and clustered information architecture are the factors causing damage to your business website and web app. All these factors come under the umbrella term of user experience. Following is a list to make your angular app’s user experience great.

1. Error handling

Many times AngularJS programmers forget to handle errors that involve user interaction, like submitting a form. Sometimes users submit the form and there is no success message, other times the loading icon keeps on spinning and nothing happens. With APIs and third party plugins involved the risk increases, so error handling and try-catch methods come in handy.

2. Store data as cache

When dealing with cached data there are two scenarios. The first is providing cached data to users when they are navigating from page to page. Second scenario, providing the data only when users return to the app. 

Let’s look at both of them in detail.

Example: imagine an app has 3 pages, i.e. home, product details, and cart. Home page has a list of products. Product_Details page has in depth details about one specific product, product reviews, add to cart option. Cart page has a list of products a user has added to the cart. 

First scenario: an API call is made when the user opens the home page to fetch all products and backend code is activated to show it on the front-end. They click on the product and get to the product detail page, and go back home again.

Now most apps would take time to load the products which takes a few microseconds. Worse apps will load the page entirely and the user would have to start scrolling from the start and get to the product they were at.

Great apps would have stored home page data as cache. So, as soon as the user goes back, products are listed while the page is still loading complete products in the background. To show progress AngularJS developers can show a loading bar at top.

Remember that this type of approach is not good where data is changing constantly, like a twitter feed. 

Second scenario: this time the user opens the app and sees the home page. The API is called and products are fetched. Then the user gets to the product description page. 

Most web apps and websites face slow loading here, and often overlook this loading time. To keep users engaged and avoid them from waiting, AngularJS programmers should list a few product details as soon as the page is loaded.

Reducing payload is the best approach, for that load any content like product description. While users read info, load the image and then other parts like add to cart and so on. 

3. Hydrating store state from localStorage

Fast loading, up to 3 seconds is absolutely necessary. But, do you want to push it even further? Load the initial page even faster if the user comes back to your site. Not waiting for API response, which here is: FetchProduct. Instead what data is locally available is displayed while response is received and then all products are completely displayed. Hire angularJS developers who can do this professionally. This is also called hydrating data from localStorage.

Take these cautions when going for hydrating data approach:

• Never store sensitive data

• Make sure the data stored makes sense to display

4. Interacting optimistically with UI

When users click a button they expect the web app to show some kind of response. For instance, when the user clicks on add to cart button they expect the cart icon to be updated with items present in the cart. If this takes time the user experience and user journey is disturbed. If AngularJS developers keep on waiting for the server to get a response, i.e. if the database is updated or not, UX takes a hit. 

Summary

There are a lot of tricks to improve the user experience of an angular application. Above mentioned tricks and tips are to make your app faster which improves UX.