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The Five Screens Developers Forget to Build
Your UI looks finished when everything works. The real test is what happens when it doesn’t.
Most UI screenshots show data already loaded, successful saves, and forms with all the right information in all the right places.
Fair enough. Nobody wants a portfolio full of error messages.
But production software spends plenty of time outside that perfect screenshot. Requests fail. Tables return nothing. People click Save and wonder whether anything happened. Sometimes the connection drops at precisely the moment you need it most.
We tend to call these edge cases, as if they rarely happen. Yet they’re ordinary parts of using software, especially when the application handles orders, inventory, payments, or other data people cannot afford to lose.
There are five states I think deserve attention long before a product is called finished: empty, loading, error, success, and no results.
They’re usually states within a screen, not five separate pages. The title is a little dramatic, admittedly, but these are the screens people end up seeing when the happy path disappears.
1. The Empty State: When There’s Nothing Here Yet
