In this case, we were given expectations of what content would be displayed and where, and those expectations ended up being misleading. We now have to re-orient ourselves to where the content ends up being displayed.

When the skeleton screen doesn’t match the outcome, we’ve created confusion and frustration that will overcome any benefit you might have gotten from trying to handle that delay in a better way.

"We gave the test to 136 people, and the skeleton screen performed the worst by all metrics. Users in the skeleton screen group took longer to complete the task, were more likely to evaluate their wait time negatively (by answering the first question with “Strongly disagree” or “Moderately disagree”), and guessed that the wait time had been longer than users who saw the loading spinner or a blank screen."

"Skeleton screens can improve the feel of any action taking longer than a few hundred milliseconds. Applying them to your rendering bottlenecks will make your UI feel faster and make people happier."