What to ask your agency about empty states
Every audit we run turns up some version of this. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on empty states, these questions are worth asking early.
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.
Questions worth asking
- Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
- How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
- What happens if it needs changing in a year?
- What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?
What a good answer sounds like
The first screen a new user sees is usually empty. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.
Blank space with no guidance reads as broken. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.
How to tell if yours is fine
Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. 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
Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.