The Challenge of Designing the "Blank Slate"
Fri 19 Sep 2003, 02:21 PM
by Ben Langhinrichs
On Signal vs. Noise today, there is an
excellent post on the dilemma of designing an application that will be full of data, but delivering it empty. Take a blog template for example. When you see a blog in use, it has lots of links and articles and calendar entries and looks great. Then, you start your own blog and face devestating emptiness. There are no months where the months go until you have created some posts. The views come up with No Documents Found messages. There are no links.
Unfortunately, we as developers are uually working with a full set of data, possibly faked, but still full. The customer or potential customer starts with a blank slate at the exact moment when they need to evaluate and make a purchase/pay decision. What is the best way to address this? We ignore it at our peril.
Aye!
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