I design tools for people who work with data, and I write about how they get made.

On a boat outside the Koster Islands, a marine biologist handed me her phone. The observation list was empty. My prototype offered a neat illustration and an encouraging instruction: “Add your first observation.” She looked at the water, then back at me. “We’re waiting for the tide,” she said.

I had designed the absence of records as the absence of progress. In her working day, waiting was part of the method. The screen knew nothing about that, and its cheerful little prompt made the wrong assumption.

Empty is a condition, not a conclusion

Back at my desk, I opened the tide table she used. Its quiet stretches were as informative as its peaks. A low reading wasn’t a missing reading. It described a condition, placed that condition in time, and helped her decide what to do next.

We started separating the reasons a list might be empty. No observations yet. No observations matching these filters. Observations saved on another device. A download that hadn’t finished. These states looked identical in the first prototype, but each asked something different of the person holding it.

“An empty state should explain the situation before it asks someone to change it.”

That distinction changed our content model before it changed our layouts. Instead of passing an empty array straight to a generic component, we passed a little context alongside it:

{
  "observations": [],
  "sync": "up_to_date",
  "survey": "waiting_for_low_tide"
}

The resulting message was plain: “No observations for this survey yet. Low tide is expected at 14:20.” The action to add a record stayed available, but it stopped being the screen’s only idea of what might happen next.

Start with the reason

Now, when I encounter an empty view, I write down three questions before drawing anything: What do we actually know? What might the person reasonably expect? What useful step is available? Sometimes the answer is a button. Sometimes it’s an explanation, a timestamp, or permission to wait.

There’s a limit here: an interface shouldn’t invent certainty. If the connection is gone, say when the data was last checked. If the reason is unknown, say so. A specific, honest message earns more trust than a friendly guess.

The boat taught me something my component library couldn’t: a screen is never really empty. Someone brings a task, a place, and a moment to it. Our job is to make room for those things.