Status: Phase 1 stub. Matures in Phase 5 per §8.1.

Statement

Empty states are designed surfaces, not absence-of-content. Every primary surface that can be empty (inbox, group list, vault root, mail folders, search results) has a deliberately authored empty state with an illustration, a content-first sentence, and either zero CTAs or one — never two competing ones.

Why

The audit catalogued 14 empty states across the app. Most were generic "Nothing here yet" lines centered in their container. A few had stacks of 2-3 buttons offering everything the user could do, which produced choice paralysis and obscured the primary action. A handful were truly absent — the page rendered as a flat blank, which the user reads as an error state.

An empty state is the first impression of a surface. It sets the register for everything that follows: the inbox with no messages teaches the user how this app talks about messaging before they ever read one. Wasting that moment on "Nothing here yet" is a small failure repeated dozens of times.

The illustration-family (Phase 4 Track A — envelope/seal/orb family) gives the empty states a visual through-line. The single-sentence content-first copy (V-2 voice & tone) gives them a tonal through-line.

How

Phase 2 introduces an <EmptyState> primitive variant on the relevant primitives (or a dedicated primitive — DEC pending). Phase 4 ships the illustration family. Per-route empty states are authored during the per-route swap-in (Phase 3).

Phase 5 deepens this stub with the per-surface empty-state specification, the illustration family catalog, and per-component citations.