The Importance of The Blank Slate

One of the mistakes I see in products is not designing the blank slate, a state where the user has not entered any data.

The Blank Slate was coined by 37 Signals in their Getting Real book and in a blog post.

It's defined like this:

Blank slate is the screen people see when they start using an application and there is no data to show yet. Leaving it blank would not make a good first impression, so it should be filled with something useful to make the impression positive and help people get started. source

I designed the blank slates in Wedoist, but not for Todoist until recently. Adding them makes Todoist much more sticky.

The lesson I learned is that improving the blank slate is an easy way to make a product more sticky and user-friendly.

For reference here's how blank slates look like in Todoist: