On a boat outside the Koster Islands, I watched a researcher refresh a tide table three times. The screen was blank. She wasn’t impatient; she was trying to work out whether the water was doing nothing, the connection was doing nothing, or the app was doing nothing. Three very different situations, wearing exactly the same interface.
I had designed that interface. Back at my desk, the empty state had seemed like a quiet corner of the product: a small illustration, a friendly sentence, a button to try again. On the boat, it was a question we hadn’t answered.
Empty is a state of knowledge
A tide table without entries might mean there are no predictions for this station. It might mean the predictions haven’t arrived yet. Or it might mean we have yesterday’s data, sitting safely on the device, but haven’t decided whether to show it. Calling all three “No data” throws away the most useful information we have.
“An empty screen should explain what we know, not just what we don’t have.”
We started by writing the states in plain language, away from the layout. For each one, we asked: what happened, what can someone trust, and what can they do next? Only then did we decide what belonged on the screen.
{
"status": "offline",
"last_updated": "2026-10-01T16:30:00Z",
"cached_predictions": true
}
This little object changed the conversation. The screen wasn’t empty anymore. It had an explanation, a timestamp, and something useful to offer. We could show the saved predictions, label them clearly, and let the researcher decide whether they were suitable for the task.
Write the next useful sentence
The final copy was ordinary: “You’re offline. Showing predictions saved yesterday at 18:30.” No apology, no cheerful drawing, no suggestion that refreshing harder would improve the signal. We placed the timestamp beside the table rather than hiding it behind an information icon.
I now sketch empty states before the happy path is finished. They expose assumptions about time, certainty, and responsibility that a populated dashboard can quietly conceal. They also give engineers and writers a shared way to discuss what the system actually knows.
That morning, the researcher stopped refreshing and went back to her samples. A useful interface sometimes earns its keep by giving someone permission to look away.