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March 23, 2004
Blank Slates
37Signals posts on the "blank slate" state of an application have been incredibly helpful to me lately.
In chronological order, there's an initial discussion, a long follow-up with screens from Basecamp, and then today's post on the related topic of active help.
The "blank slate" state is the starting state of an application, before it's been filled up with data: an address book that the user hasn't added any names to yet, for example. It's crucial to distinguish this from a situation that might come up after an application's been in use a while and the user might have deleted data from it.
When we designed the blank slates in Basecamp, we wanted to make sure that we provided examples - both visually and textually - of what will eventually occupy a page. We also made sure that we always provided suggestions of how to get started...
I admit I've been guilty of exactly what the 37signals guys describe: designing an interface for when it's full of data, but neglecting when it's not. Luckily, it's easy to fix. I've been backfilling sections of the apps we're developing right now with "blank slate" content, which in almost every case can be as simple as "here's what this box is for, and you can start filling it up by clicking here." Our tech writer loves this, because we'll be able to make use of a sentence or two that he's already written for our user manuals that introduces a feature or explains a concept.
(I'm sorta with Sippey on Basecamp as an idea, though. I think that project management can benefit from making use of blogs, but I'm not sure that a blog is the best thing to actually use to manage a project.)
Posted by Andrew at March 23, 2004 09:41 PM