@chris.raroque: MISTAKE NO. 9/10 ✶ Assuming my app was obvious to use 🤦‍♂️ The most dangerous screen in my app was the one with nothing on it… Developers usually call this an empty state. It’s the screen someone sees before they’ve added any data. In my budgeting app, new users opened the app to a completely blank budget. Before it became useful, they had to decide which categories they needed and create every one themselves. I assumed people would figure it out, but the first beta test made it pretty clear they didn’t. Only 3 out of the first 100 people actually got started. The feedback was really clear: people didn’t know which categories to make, and building an entire budget from scratch felt daunting. To be fair, this was a very small sample size and a pretty extreme result, but it was a huge wake-up call for me. So I made their job one tap. I added a button that generated sample categories they could keep, edit, or delete. In the next small test, 100% of users started adding categories. After that first tap, almost no one had to sit on the empty screen anymore. I’ve started doing this in my other apps too. In Ellie, my daily planning app, the empty state helps people generate ideas for lists instead of expecting them to come up with everything themselves. I still catch myself assuming an app is obvious because I built it. There’s almost always another way to guide the user and reduce how much they have to figure out. I’m never leaving new users with an empty app and expecting them to figure it out again. This was mistake 9 of 10. The last one is about how one of my apps got hacked 🥲 #softwaredeveloper #appdevelopment #buildinpublic #indiedev

Chris Raroque

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Wednesday 02 September 2026 17:49:56 GMT