Getting started with empty states
This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. A short on-ramp to empty states for teams who have not touched it before.
Design decisions are the ones clients feel most confident arguing about, which makes it worth separating taste from evidence early. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.
The reason this keeps coming up
The first screen a new user sees is usually empty. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.
Your first week
- Find out what is already in place
- An empty state should teach the next action
- Change one thing and measure it
Blank space with no guidance reads as broken. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.
The short version
The measurable part of design is whether people can find what they came for and act on it without hesitating. Three things worth confirming about empty states before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- An empty state should teach the next action — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.