Open any design file for an internal tool and the dashboard is full. Twelve orders, four projects, a chart with a pleasing curve. It is the state the product will spend most of its life in, and it is the state no user starts in.
The first thing a real person sees is a screen with nothing on it.
An empty screen is a question
Faced with nothing, the user asks three things, in this order: is it broken, is it mine, and what do I do?
A page that says No results answers none of them. A page that says No invoices yet — they appear here when we issue one, usually at the end of the month answers all three, and it also teaches how the system works at the exact moment somebody is willing to read.
That is the part worth noticing. The empty state is the only screen where the user has nothing else to look at. It is the cheapest teaching opportunity in the whole product, and most products spend it on the word “None”.
Not every empty screen is the same
There are at least four, and they need different words.
Nothing yet, because the account is new — this is the teaching one, and it can carry the action that fills it. Nothing left, because the work is finished — this one is allowed to be pleased about it. Nothing found, because a filter is too narrow — this one needs a way back, not an explanation. And nothing loaded, because something failed — this one must say so plainly and offer a retry, and must never be dressed up as one of the other three.
The last confusion is the expensive one. A failure that looks like an empty list teaches people to believe an empty list, and later a real failure passes unnoticed.
Design it first
We start screens from empty for a practical reason: it forces the question of how anything gets in there. Half the time, drawing the empty state reveals that the flow which fills it does not exist yet.
If the empty screen is designed last, it becomes whatever fits in the space that is left. That is how products end up with a beautifully considered table and a grey line of eight-point text where the user’s first impression should be.