Design how it behaves, not just how it looks

The most expensive design is a beautiful screen with no empty state. It looks finished, it passes review, and it pushes every genuinely difficult question to an engineer sitting alone on a Thursday afternoon.

The states that decide the product

Data-heavy products are defined by their edges, not their middle. Our designers have to cover all of these before a screen counts as finished.

• Empty, and first-time empty. These are two different states with two different jobs.
• Loading — including the case where loading takes eleven seconds.
• Partly loaded. Some data arrived and some failed. Very common, and almost never designed.
• Errors, separating what the user can fix from what they cannot.
• Too much content. The name that is 90 characters long, the table with 40,000 rows.
• No permission. This is a design problem long before it is a security one.

Research that answers a real decision

We only run research when there is already a decision on the calendar and a realistic result that would change it. Research with no decision attached is a hobby with a budget. Research that arrives after the decision is just a record of a mistake.

If no possible finding would change what you build, you are not doing research. You are collecting reassurance.