Design

Research and rationale

Our loading spinner is based on the Bootstrap design already utilised in the Queensland government's Single Website Experience (SWE).

The choice to adopt this design stems from a few key considerations.

Firstly, the decision was guided by our principle of leveraging established and proven design patterns. Circular styles spinners are perhaps the most ubiquitous (Kernaghan, 2023) and this bootstrap style is widely used. By using this design we benefit from the familiarity users already have with the loading spinners purpose and intent. Be adopting this style we are also maintaining consistency with what Queensland Government has done in the past and what users has experience already on our government websites.

Secondly, the existing component was deemed lightweight, accessible, and versatile, with code and a design that was easy to adopt and incorporate into the design system. One change we did make was to included a new minimal version that was comprised of only the spinner. This was done so that component could be incorporated contextually into other components where necessary, this was an additional use case identified for the spinner during our comparative review.

Finally the spinner’s minimalistic design, with its clean lines and simple shapes fit well the the visual language of our design system. Its unobtrusive appearance ensures that it complements rather than distracts from the other content on the page and its style matches other elements such as our line style iconography.