The blank page problem
I often advise on the problems of onboarding, process change management, and usability that behaviours are frequently caused by what I call “the blank page problem”.
In the tech world, if you give a user a blank screen or series of inputs with little guidance (e.g no placeholder text or default values) it adds a huge cognitive load to the point they’ll abandon the task.
I’ve found the problem also exists in creative realms. When my kids are doing their homework, if their task is open ended with a blank page they stall, procrastinate and need strong encouragement to complete it.
The good news is solving this problem is really quite simple. Provide defaults, examples or just a starting point.
For example; if you’re creating a user interface for a resume builder that prompts users to put in a professional bio, use something like GPT3 to provide suggestions or just some stock examples that could be pasted in. The quickest win of all is just to add placeholder text and considered copy for labels in forms. E.g for a Phone number field: use the label “Mobile Phone Number” as opposed to “Phone” and have a placeholder of “+44 790 411 2222”.
Regarding creative endeavors like creating a presentation, creating an illustration or writing a blog post just start. Write a bunch of words just to get the motions of “pen to paper” into gear and try to keep the cadence up. Shape it into something useful over time, removing the initial gibberish when it gets good (hopefully).
A powerful but often overlooked opportunity in the software world is to provide example content for onboarding experiences. Allow the user to delete rather than add things to get going. For example if you have a CRM platform, add Mrs Demo User with completed representative and relevant (not Lorem Ipsum) information in all fields. Gmail and most email clients tend to do this well by starting you off with intro emails in your new inbox.
