Designing every state, including the ugly ones

A design file typically contains one state per screen: full of plausible data, nothing loading, nothing broken. Then engineering builds the other six, at speed, without a designer, on the day of the deadline.

The seven

• Empty — nothing yet. An invitation to act, not an apology.
• Loading — and what to show if it takes eight seconds rather than one.
• Partial — some data arrived. Show it rather than blocking on the slowest item.
• Stale — cached and possibly wrong. Say when it was last fresh.
• Offline — a normal state, not an error.
• Error — what happened and what to do about it, in the interface's voice.
• Permission denied — who to ask, not just that you cannot.

The cost of designing all seven is perhaps 20% more design time. The cost of not designing them is that a developer invents them under pressure, and your product's worst moments are the ones nobody art-directed.