Every product ships with a first screen that nobody designs on purpose: the one where there is no data yet. It is the screen a new account sees, the screen a demo account sees, and — because it is the easiest one to reach — very often the screen that ends up in the App Store listing, the pitch deck and the portfolio.
That last part is the problem. An empty state is honest about a new account. It is dishonest about the product, because it shows a thing that does nothing.
The screenshot problem
We rebuilt this site recently and went through our own work looking for captures. The one we had of Tally — our tax app — showed a profile page reading zero per cent complete, three fields marked “not set”, and an account called preview@tally.app. Every pixel of it was real. It was also the least representative screen in the entire app.
Nobody had chosen it. It was simply the screen you land on when you install the app and do nothing, which is exactly the state a person is in when they open a simulator to take a screenshot.
The captures you have are the ones that were easy to take, not the ones that show the product working.
Why this is not a design problem
The instinct is to design a better empty state. Illustration, a friendly line, a call to action. Worth doing, and it will not fix this. A well-designed screen with nothing in it still communicates nothing in it.
What fixes it is having data. Not invented data — a populated account you actually use, so the screens you show are the screens people meet after the product has earned a week of their attention. That is a slower fix than a design pass, which is why it usually loses.
What we do about it now
Three things, none of them clever. We keep an account with real history in it, and take captures from that rather than from a fresh install. We shoot from a release build, because a debug overlay in the corner of a portfolio image reads as carelessness whether or not it is. And when a screen genuinely has nothing to show, we leave it out rather than pad a grid with it.
On this site there are two projects with no captures at all. Their tiles say “capture coming”. That is a worse-looking page than one filled with screens, and a more accurate one. We would rather be short than misleading, and the fix is on a list rather than hidden behind a picture of an empty screen.
Written by Jack White — Sydney, Australia