Most products are designed full. The mockups show a dashboard with eighteen months of data, a busy inbox and a team of twelve. Then a real customer signs up and sees a grey box that says ‘No items yet’.
So I now design the empty state before anything else. It forces the first question every product has to answer: what should a new person do in the next thirty seconds?
At Orrin, writing the empty pay run screen first changed the order of onboarding. Adding one freelancer, not connecting a bank, became the first step, because that was the smallest thing that made the screen useful.
The rule I use: an empty state must name one action, show what the screen will look like once it’s done, and never apologise.
