Design mockups are almost always drawn full: six cards laid out, a list twenty rows deep. Yet the screen people most often leave from is the opposite one — the screen with nothing on it.
No search results. No items matching this combination of filters. Nothing created yet. When that screen amounts to the words “no results”, most visitors press back, and that back press is the last action of the session.
Three things an empty screen has to say
Every well-made empty state carries the same three.
Why it is empty is satisfied by repeating the conditions. Not “no results” but “no articles yet for Performance × Beginner” — now the reader can see what they asked for and work out for themselves which condition to loosen.
What can be done now is where the screen earns its keep. Offer the result of dropping one condition, link an adjacent topic, point at a likely misspelling. The list may be empty; there is no reason for the page to be.
How to get back is the one most often missing. A visitor who filtered their way to zero and finds no route back to everything will look for one in the browser’s back button. At that moment the filter has stopped being a tool and become a trap.
Empty is not one state
The same emptiness, arrived at differently, needs different words. One message covering all of them reads badly in every case.
Separating first use from no results matters most. Telling someone who has created nothing yet that there are “no results” makes the system look broken. That screen is in fact your best onboarding opportunity — this is exactly where you explain how to make the first item.
Better still: never let zero be clicked
The best empty screen is one nobody reaches. If a filter can produce nothing, you can say so before it is pressed.
The method is simple: put a count on every filter option. “Performance 12”, “Beginner 5”, and nobody chooses the option that leads nowhere. Options at zero can be disabled or dropped from the list altogether.
And the first option is always “All”. The route back from a filtered state has to exist on the screen itself, and the front of the filter list is the most natural place for it.
Empty pages are a signal to search engines too
Slightly outside design, but it should be decided at the same time. Filter combinations can generate an unbounded number of addresses, and a large share of them return nothing. Letting those get indexed creates a great many near-empty pages, and search engines read that as a quality signal.
The usual answer is to keep filter-combination URLs out of the index and point them at the plain list as the canonical address. The judgement is that the filter is useful to people and unnecessary to crawlers, and this is how you stop those two needs from colliding.
Indexing policy for archives and filtered addresses is covered further in the SEO archive, and folding filters down for narrow viewports is in the responsive series. The order in which we review screens ourselves is published on the process page.