On the boring half
Empty states, error states, edge cases, the small print, the page that nobody clicks. The boring half is where most projects fail and where we deliberately spend half our time.
There are two halves to every web project. The first half is the obvious one. It is the home page, the marquee feature, the marketing surface that gets photographed for the case study. The second half is everything else. The four-oh-four. The empty state when there are no results. The error when the form refuses to submit. The unsubscribe page. The legal text. The page that loads when the user goes back two steps and then refreshes.
The obvious half is what everyone reviews. It is what stakeholders see in the kickoff. It is what design directors share on the design sites. It is what wins awards.
The boring half is what determines whether the site actually works.
We have an internal rule that has held up for several years now: budget half the engineering time for the boring half. If we have ten engineering days, five go to the obvious half and five go to the boring half. The rule sounds extreme. It is approximately correct.
The boring half is where users learn whether the studio that built the site cared about them. The empty state with a helpful sentence and a useful next action signals care. The empty state that says No results found does not. The four-oh-four with a sentence and three relevant links signals care. The default browser four-oh-four does not. The error state that explains what went wrong, what to do next, and provides a one-click escape signals care. The error state that says An error occurred does not.
None of these moments are photographable. They will not feature in the case study. They will not be on the design sites. They will simply be the moments where, over the working life of the site, the user trusts the site or does not.
The other reason we care about the boring half is that we ship sites and then we leave. The handover is the end of our involvement on most engagements. The boring half is what the in-house team inherits. If we did the work on the boring half, the in-house team can edit the obvious half forever and never break the boring half. If we did not do the work, the in-house team will quietly discover, six months in, that nothing is finished.
Next time you commission a site, ask the studio to walk you through the boring half. Ask them to show you the empty states, the error states, the four-oh-four, the legal pages. If the answer is in placeholders, the work is not done.