How to get empty states right
There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. The short answer to empty states is that it is mostly a sequence of small decisions, not one big one.
The measurable part of design is whether people can find what they came for and act on it without hesitating. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.
The reason this keeps coming up
The first screen a new user sees is usually empty. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.
The steps
- Establish what you have today before changing anything
- An empty state should teach the next action
- Blank space with no guidance reads as broken
- Write down the decision so the next person does not re-litigate it
Blank space with no guidance reads as broken. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.
Where to go from here
What this looks like day to day
Design decisions are the ones clients feel most confident arguing about, which makes it worth separating taste from evidence early. Three things worth confirming about empty states before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- The first screen a new user sees is usually empty — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.