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Creating Empty States

Launch engaging empty states to drive self-activation of unused features

Flora Sanders avatar
Written by Flora Sanders
Updated over 4 months ago

When it comes to Empty States in your product, don't let them go to waste! Instead, you can leverage these vacant spaces to educate your users, promote key product capabilities, and foster greater user adoption.

Common Empty State Use Cases

Performant Empty States help users to:

  • start deriving value from your product quicker

  • get confident with your product without confusion

  • be encouraged to explore and engage with additional features

  • navigate efficiently, saving time and helping them achieve their goals faster

With Candu, you can create many different Empty States flavors that look and feel native to your product.

Use Case: First-Time Feature Use

A fundamental way to help users familiarize themselves with the ins and outs of an unused feature is to provide them with self-serve guidance to get up and running. Could you include this information in your empty state instead of saying, 'No X here yet'? Add some text to describe what the feature does and then provide CTAs to educate users on how it works.

  • Trigger an overlay with a tutorial video in it

  • Add a CTA that launches a third-party tour

  • Link out to any helpful guides or resources

Use Case: Upgrade Splash Pages

Empty states present an ideal chance to inspire users to consider purchasing or upgrading their plan. Simply stating, 'Upgrade to Pro to access this feature' would be a missed opportunity. Instead, you can try crafting a more compelling message that informs users about the availability of exclusive features and encourages them to take action and explore the benefits of upgrading their plan.

Use Case: Recipes & Templates

This is a variation of a first-use Empty State but is specific to products that offer a large number of templates, recipes, or use cases for users when they are getting started—very common for product-led companies!

Provide users with personalized recommendations on the best templates to try based on what you know they care about or tools they use, and remove some of the decision-making for them 😏


Creating Empty States in Candu

To create an Empty State, you can start from an existing template or start from scratch. There are many templates for you to choose from that make it quick to get started:

If you are creating one from scratch, you can use any combination of components to create your desired Empty State design.

For example, let's make a simple first-use Empty State from scratch:

Empty States are embedded like other inline Candu content. You can learn more about how to launch Empty States in this guide.

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