The Nine States of Design
M odern UI teams are designing components first; Interfaces are merely the thoughtful composition of components. This leaves an often glaring hole for users on “the unhappy path” — The places where users may, intentionally or not, stray from your idealized flow. As we learn to craft systems rather than pages, we must invest effort into shaping these often missed states of design and create with a component lifecycle that can support everyone. Here’s the lifecycle as I see it:
What happens before your component does anything? Maybe it’s the first time a user sees it. Maybe it’s not activated yet. Essentially, the component exists but hasn’t started.
The dreaded state. In a perfect world, no one would ever see this; Alas, here we find ourselves. There are plenty of ways to keep your loading state subtle and unobtrusive. Facebook does a pretty good job of this:
Your component has initialized, but it’s empty. No data. No Items. Now may be a good time to get the user to act (“Do this thing!”), or to reward them (“Good job, everything is taken care of”).
