We were twenty minutes from shore when the screen went blank. Not broken, not loading. Just empty. The biologist beside me looked at the tablet, then at the water, and asked a question our prototype couldn’t answer: “Is there nothing here, or do you just not know yet?”

I had designed the empty state for Tidepool at my desk. A small illustration, a friendly sentence, and a button to add an observation. It assumed that an absence of records meant an absence of activity. On the boat, that assumption fell apart.

Empty is not one thing

There were several reasons a station might show no observations. Nobody had surveyed it. Someone had surveyed it and found nothing. Records existed, but hadn’t reached this device. The tide hadn’t made the site accessible yet. Each situation asked for a different next step.

Later, back on land, I noticed that the tide table didn’t apologise for low water. It showed a time, a height, and what came next. A low point was information. It had a place in a larger pattern.

That became our starting point. Instead of designing a more charming blank screen, we wrote down the states we actually knew about:

station: "West coast / 04"
survey_status: "not_started"
local_observations: 0
last_synced: "2026-09-24T07:30:00Z"

The zero stayed, but it stopped carrying the whole story. We separated “not surveyed” from “surveyed, nothing found” and made the last successful sync visible. When the device was offline, we said so without turning an ordinary working condition into an error.

Write the next useful sentence

Our new copy was less cheerful and more useful: “No observations recorded on this device. Last synced at 07:30. You can still start a survey.” It told the biologist what the system knew, where that knowledge stopped, and what remained possible.

We tested the wording in context, with the tablet in its waterproof case and somebody else holding the boat steady. The next question was about the survey, rather than the screen. That felt like progress.

I now start empty states with a small inventory: what happened, what we know, what we don’t, and what someone can do next. An illustration can still help. But first, the interface owes its reader an honest account of the situation. Sometimes the most useful thing a tool can say is exactly how much it knows.