Loading Spinner (Home Office Design System)
The UK Home Office’s design-system component guidance for a loading spinner, used across its own caseworking and identity-verification services.
License: Open Government Licence v3.0 — https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/, the same basis as GOV.UK Design System. Inferred from the UK central-government default: this page carries no per-page OGL statement of its own, but Home Office content is Crown copyright, and UK government digital services publish under OGL v3.0 by default unless stated otherwise.
Key points
- Consider whether the underlying speed or responsiveness of the service can be technically improved before reaching for a loading spinner — a spinner mitigates a wait, it doesn’t justify one.
- If something goes wrong or the loading period times out, tell users there has been a problem and provide a link to another suitable action; never let the spinner loop indefinitely with no way out.
- Explain what the user is waiting for in the accompanying text, rather than showing the spinner with no context.
- Accessibility: apply
role="status"to the live region containing the loading message so assistive technology monitors it for updates, and update that region’s content to notify the user when the state changes. - Cited research finding: an animated loading spinner gave users more confidence that something was still happening, compared with a static text message alone.