In this episode, we focus on improving user experience when booking appointments. We start by ensuring that the booking form section only appears once a time slot is selected—preventing users from seeing or interacting with the booking form until it's actually relevant. This helps keep the interface clean and intuitive.
Next, we deal with a common UI issue: flickering elements on page load. When fetching data asynchronously (like our available dates and slots), you might notice form sections or buttons appear briefly before disappearing or rendering properly. To solve this, we use Alpine.js's x-cloak directive, along with a simple CSS rule, to completely hide elements from view until Alpine has finished initializing and is ready to properly display them. Goodbye, UI flicker!
Lastly, we talk through ways of handling the brief empty state while your slots are loading—suggesting you could add a placeholder or a minimum height to help the page look smoother during loading. With all these small tweaks, our booking form looks and behaves much better, setting us up to move on to actually saving appointments to the database next.