Tells actors that there’s no content to display. Provides explanation and guidance to help actor progress. Typically surfaces a Button as the primary call to action.
Variants
Blank slate
Basic empty state for first use experience.
Informational
Provides information about what to do next.
Educational
A contextual onboarding flow to gain deeper understanding of the system.
Guiding
Starter that allows users to learn the system by tinkering or setting up their data.
Consequences
- the gap explains itself and points somewhere: the actor knows why there is nothing here and what would put something here
- first-run emptiness is the largest uninterrupted surface the system ever gets, and it arrives in front of an actor who has committed nothing yet
- the empty states multiply — every filter, every permission boundary, every new container has one — and the ones nobody wrote say nothing
Appears in
Learning
- Shaping the first encounter, step 2 — Make the emptiness speak
Related patterns
Hosts
- Onboarding — the empty state is often the canvas onboarding builds on
Enacts
- Learnability — the educational and guiding variants teach the system from inside the gap they announce