Mastering Messages
September 28, 2023
What I'm Listening To
'So I lay there and wait for the sun…'
Story From The Week
This week I learned the importance of an informative empty state message. I had never heard the term, “empty state message”, before my coworker casually mentioned the term last week. But as soon as I Googled it, I realized immediately what it was… and realized that the empty state messages throughout our products are subpar.
So I did what every busy developer would do. I created a ticket to improve the message presented to our users when data is not presented on a page, reviewed the code, merged it in to our testing environments, and then got curious and researched how to write helpful and imperative messages for various types of empty states.
I mean, I’m doing my best.
But for real — the article is useful, and I highly recommend giving it a read. The author outlines the various instances where empty states appear like when users haven’t created items that are supposed to appear on the page or when users have deleted all of the items in a list, etc… She then provides examples and argues the importance of crafting an intentional message for each type.
I learned that we should probably write imperative messages with a call to action in certain places throughout our product. So instead of just saying something like, “You don’t have any comments yet,” we could say, “Add your first comment. Comments help other staff members understand important details of the appointment. [Add Comment Button].”
So even though I didn’t get it quite right the first time around, luckily the good thing about code is that its pliable!
What Did I Learn?
I love stumbling upon a new (to me) JavaScript method.
This week I learned about padStart . It’s used to add padding characters to the beginning of a string, ensuring that the resulting string reaches a specified length. The method takes two arguments: the desired length and the padding character(s) to insert. It’s often used to format data with leading zeros, like a date. So for instance, if you had a variable called month that equaled ‘5’, month.padStart(2, ‘0’) would equal ‘05’. Pretty nifty!
What Made Me Confused...
Am I the only one who runs into issues every time they spin up their Rails server? Without fail, every time I pull down changes onto a local branch and spin it up, I then have to traverse through a forest of errors regarding migrations and configurations. As a clueless JS developer, I managed to wrestle with a bunch of them this week, but I’m sorry to say my flashlight dimmed, I stubbed my toe, and ran out of protein bars. So here I am, still hacking my way through the thicket of errors.