The states nobody designs.
The empty basket. The 404. The server error. The sold-out notice. The moments a visitor is most annoyed are the moments most brands abandon their voice entirely, and this is where we do the opposite.
Fourteen states, each built properly.
Loading
Loading a trailer. It pairs safely with Germinating for the spinner, so the two puns never collide on the same…
Coughing Up
Blunt about money. Naming the pain reduces cart anxiety rather than increasing it, which is counter-intuitive and well-evidenced.
Shaking On It
A handshake deal, not a transaction receipt. The most under-used screen in e-commerce and the one people actually read.
Germinating
Progress framed as growth, never as a percentage. A percentage that stalls at 94 is worse than no percentage at…
Fallowing
"Nothing growing here yet. On a farm that is deliberate. On a website, less so." Always with exactly one route…
Trespassing
"You have wandered off the footpath." With a map back to the main sections, and the badger — which is…
Cocking Up
Uses Clarkson’s own documented words after the 2023 cider recall — "we completely cocked up". Owning the failure is the…
Straying
"You have lost signal. So has most of Oxfordshire." Which is true, and is the correct tone for a rural…
Breaking Down
A tractor in a field, and an honest estimate. "Back shortly" is not an estimate and everybody knows it.
Having Words
Corrective and dry, never red and shouty. The error appears beside the field, after you leave it, in a sentence…
Cleaned Out
True to the actual queues at the shop and the pub. Four of the five soft toys are permanently in…
Queueing
The most British possible framing, and factually what happened when the pub opened. A release-night queue is an infrastructure decision,…
Nagging
The name is a promise of restraint. Frequency-capped, categorised, and off by default for everything that is not an order…
Slashing
Blunt. And governed by one rule: the "was" price must be a price the thing was genuinely sold at, for…
Why this is the part that matters.
A homepage is seen once. An empty basket, a validation error and a sold-out badge are seen by almost everybody, repeatedly, at the exact moment they are least patient.
So each one here has a name from the same grammar as everything else, a beast, a copy direction and a design rule — and each one is a real page you can look at rather than a note in a specification that nobody will read.
The 500 error is called Cocking Up, in the brand’s own documented words after the 2023 cider recall. The 404 is Trespassing, and its beast is the badger from Chapter 12. The empty state is Fallowing, which on a farm is deliberate and on a website is less so.
Every state, its name and its rule.
| State | Called | The rule |
|---|---|---|
| The basket | Loading | A basket is the highest-intent screen on any shop and it is almost always the ugliest. This one … |
| Checkout | Coughing Up | Every additional checkout step costs conversion. Every hidden cost costs trust. This is one page… |
| Order confirmation | Shaking On It | The confirmation screen has the highest attention of any page in a shop and is normally wasted o… |
| Loading | Germinating | The research is consistent: a skeleton screen that shows the shape of what is coming feels faste… |
| Empty states | Fallowing | An empty state is a design brief, not an accident. The three things it must do are explain why i… |
| The 404 | Trespassing | Most 404 pages offer a home button and a joke. A useful one offers the whole navigation, because… |
| The 500 error | Cocking Up | The 2023 cider recall statement began "we completely cocked up" and sales rose afterwards. An er… |
| Offline | Straying | Half this audience is standing in a field. An offline state that pretends connectivity is univer… |
| Maintenance | Breaking Down | The only two things a maintenance page must do are give a genuine estimate and say what still wo… |
| Form validation | Having Words | Validation that fires on every keystroke is hostile. Validation that appears only on submit is w… |
| Sold out | Cleaned Out | A sold-out page is a lead-capture opportunity that most shops waste on a grey badge. It should s… |
| The waiting room | Queueing | A series release drives fifty to a hundred times baseline traffic. A queue that tells you your p… |
| Notifications | Nagging | A notification system named Nagging cannot then send eleven push notifications a week without lo… |
| Sale and discount | Slashing | The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 gives the CMA direct fining powers over … |
And the grammar behind the names.
Six operations, one invariant rule, and forty chapters of precedent.
What people actually ask.
The two questions this page gets most, answered without a support ticket.
It does not. Every commerce control here is a placeholder and no card details are collected anywhere.
In this build, none that leaves your browser. The basket is held in memory and forgotten when the tab closes.
Elsewhere on the estate.
/lawyering/states/
/lawyering/states/
/lawyering/backing-out/
