--- title: "A Well Designed Empty State Does More Onboarding Than Your Product Tour Ever Will" description: "Empty states are the most neglected screen in modern products, yet they teach, motivate and convert at the exact moment a user is most uncertain. Stop ignoring them." author: "Kody Everson" url: "https://theipp.org/insights/A-Well-Designed-Empty-State-Does-More-Onboarding-Than-Your-Product-Tour-Ever-Will" date: "2026-06-23T10:22:26.238Z" --- # A Well Designed Empty State Does More Onboarding Than Your Product Tour Ever Will ## Summary Empty states are the most neglected screen in modern products, yet they teach, motivate and convert at the exact moment a user is most uncertain. Stop ignoring them. ## Main content The empty state is the most neglected screen in your product. It is the first genuine surface a new user encounters, it appears at the exact moment of maximum uncertainty, and it can do more durable onboarding work than the most elaborate tour your team will ever build. ## The empty state teaches; the tour just talks Product tours are seductive because they feel like teaching. A team has built something complex, the team is anxious that users will not understand it, and a tour appears to solve that anxiety by walking the user through every feature. In practice, tours are an interruption tax. They appear before the user has formed a single intention, they obscure the interface they claim to explain, and due to overuse they are often dismissed by reflex. Anyone who has watched a user screen recording knows the behaviour: the user clicks "Skip" before the first tooltip has even finished animating. The reason is simple. A tour fights the user's actual goal, which is to get started. It loads instruction before context. The empty state does the opposite. It appears precisely where the user has arrived with intent, and it teaches in the flow of doing rather than ahead of it. > A tour explains the product to a user who has no reason to care yet. An empty state explains the next action to a user who is ready to take it. If you accept that activation is the moment a user first experiences value, then the empty state is not a cosmetic screen. It is the runway to further value. Everything that happens on it either accelerates the user toward meaningful action or quietly turns them away. ## Empty states are where early churn is manufactured Most teams instrument activation and retention with care, then look for the cause of early drop-off in pricing, value proposition, or feature gaps. They rarely look at the empty state, even though it is frequently the scene of the crime. A user who signs up, lands on a blank dashboard, and finds nothing telling them what to do next has been abandoned at the threshold. And what's worse, they do not raise complaints, they simply leave. Picture this, a new user has created an account and logged in. At this moment, they have momentum and a small, fragile amount of motivation. The empty state either converts that motivation into a first action or wastes it. There is no in between outcome. A blank screen with no guidance is not neutral, it is a brick wall. This is why the empty state deserves the same evidence standard you would apply to any high-stakes flow. If you cannot say, with data, how many users get past your primary empty state and how long it takes them, you are flying blind on the single screen most responsible for whether a new user ever becomes a real one. ## What a working empty state actually does A well-designed empty state is not decoration around a blank list. It is a purposeful piece of product design that answers three questions in order, fast. - **What is this?** The user needs to understand what the screen is for in plain language. "You have no projects yet" tells them what this space holds. - **Why does it matter to me?** The user needs a reason connected to their goal, not the product's feature list. "Projects keep your team's work and deadlines in one place" links the empty space to an outcome the user wants. - **What do I do next?** The user needs an unmissable, single primary action. Not five options. One clear next step, with a low-friction path to completion. "Create your first project". The best empty states go further and remove the cold-start problem entirely. They seed the screen with a sample project, a template, or pre-populated example data the user can edit rather than create from nothing. The cognitive load of editing something is a fraction of the load of inventing something. This is why Notion's template galleries, Figma's starter files, and Linear's pre-built issue examples convert so much better than a true blank page. They turn the empty state from a wall into a doorway. Notice that none of this is a tour. There is no overlay, no sequence, no "next" button stepping the user through features they cannot yet contextualise. The teaching is embedded in the doing of the work itself. ## Why the neglect happens, and why it is a decision-rights problem The empty state is often neglected for structural reasons, not because anyone decided it did not matter. It falls into a gap between disciplines. Design considers it edge-case styling and Product considers it handled because the happy path showing a populated screen is what gets demoed and documented for requirements. No one owns the empty state, and no one is accountable for its performance because it is not in itself seen as the feature. This is a decision-rights failure as much as a design failure. When a screen has no owner, it gets no discovery, no evidence, and no iteration. The fix is to assign the empty state to someone explicitly and to treat it as a first-class part of the activation outcome that the product manager is accountable for. If your team owns an activation metric, the primary empty states feeding that metric are part of the work, not adjacent to it. There is also a prioritisation distortion at play. Empty states feel small, and small things lose to big things in every backlog ranking exercise. But the size of a change and the size of its impact are not correlated. A two-day change to the most-viewed empty state in your product can move activation more than a two-month feature build that only existing power users will touch. Reach times impact divided by effort is exactly the calculus that should push empty states up the list, and rarely does because no one quantifies the reach. ## How to treat empty states as a discovery target If you want to take this seriously, run the empty state through the same discovery process you apply to any showcase feature. - **Map the empty states.** Inventory every screen a new user can reach before they have created data. You will be surprised how many there are and how many are unstyled defaults. - **Watch real first sessions.** Session replays and moderated first-use studies show you exactly where users stall on a blank screen. The hesitation is visible and uncomfortable to watch, which is precisely why it is valuable. - **Measure progression, not just appearance.** Track the rate at which users move from each primary empty state to their first action, and the time it takes. Set a baseline before you change anything. - **Test the doorway versus the wall.** Run an experiment comparing a blank canvas against a seeded or templated version of the same screen. The effect size is usually large enough to settle the argument quickly. - **Write copy as guidance, not labels.** Replace "No items" with a sentence that orients, motivates, and directs. This is the cheapest high outcome change available to most teams. ## The practical implication for product teams The uncomfortable truth is that many teams are investing in the wrong onboarding mechanism. They are building tours, which users skip, while ignoring empty states, which users cannot avoid. The empty state is unskippable by definition. It is the screen the user is staring at while deciding whether this product is worth their effort. That is the highest-value real estate in your entire experience, and it is usually the least considered. None of this means tours are wrong, and in fact a well crafted tour on top of a curated empty state could be the North Star. There are many cases where a brief orientation helps, but the default investment ratio is backwards. For most products, the resources poured into elaborate guided tours would generate more activation if redirected toward making empty states instructive, motivating, and laid out with a clear first action. Stop building tours to compensate for screens you have neglected to design. Find your most-viewed empty states, measure how many users escape them, and treat that number as a core part of your activation accountability. The empty state is already doing your onboarding whether you have designed it or not. The only question is whether it is doing it well. ## Related pages - [Insights](https://theipp.org/insights.md) - [Product Profile](https://theipp.org/tools/product-profile.md) - [Standards](https://theipp.org/standards.md)