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August 28, 2025
You've spent weeks perfecting your product idea, mapping out the user flow, and getting excited about that beautiful interface. You hand it off to a developer or start building it yourself, and everything looks amazing in the demo. But then real users start using it, and suddenly your perfect design falls apart.
This scenario plays out for founders every single day, and it all comes down to one critical oversight: forgetting about edge cases. While you're designing for that one perfect user journey, you're missing the 90% of scenarios that actually determine whether your product feels polished or broken.
Here's what you'll learn: how to identify every possible user scenario before you build, why empty states matter more than you think, and the systematic approach to edge case planning that will save you months of redesign work.
When you're building a product, especially if you're using AI tools like Claude, Lovable, or other no-code solutions, you naturally think about the winning scenario. You want to see what happens when someone clicks a button, fills out a form, or completes an action. The tools show you exactly that - the ideal case where everything works perfectly.
But here's the hard truth: that perfect scenario represents maybe 10% of how people will actually interact with your product. The other 90% consists of edge cases - every possible situation that isn't your ideal user journey.
The most common edge case that founders miss is the empty state. When someone first opens your app, they haven't done anything yet. There's no data, no history, no content. But most designs assume users have been active for months.
Think about a dashboard that's supposed to show analytics. Your design probably looks great with charts full of data, but what does a brand new user see? An empty, confusing interface that doesn't guide them toward their first action.
Something will go wrong. The internet connection will drop, a form won't submit, or a user will try to do something they don't have permission for. If you haven't designed for these scenarios, your users will hit a wall with no clear path forward.
What happens when a user has 1,000 items in a list you designed for 10? Or when someone writes a novel in a field you expected to hold a sentence? These overflow scenarios can break your entire layout if you haven't planned for them.
For every screen or feature you're building, create a list of every possible scenario. Don't just think about the happy path - force yourself to consider what could go wrong, what could be missing, and what could be excessive.
Take the traction board example from my own product. Initially, I had it filled with sample data showing completed milestones and connected integrations. It looked beautiful. But then I stepped back and asked: what does this look like when someone first signs up? What if they haven't connected Stripe yet? What if they complete all their milestones? What if they create 50 custom milestones?
Each of these questions led to a different design requirement that I needed to account for before development.
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Whether you're coding yourself or working with a developer, document these edge cases before you start building. Create wireframes or descriptions for empty states, error messages, and loading states. This upfront work will save you countless hours of revisions later.
When you're using AI coding tools, specifically ask them to show you these edge cases. Don't just say "build me a user dashboard" - say "build me a user dashboard, and show me what it looks like when it's empty, when there's an error loading data, and when a user has too much data to display cleanly."
Edge cases aren't just nice-to-haves - they're the difference between a product that feels professional and one that feels broken. Users don't forgive poor edge case handling, even if your core functionality is brilliant.
Start with your most critical user flows and work backward from there. For each step, ask yourself: what if this fails? What if there's nothing here? What if there's too much here? Your future self (and your users) will thank you for thinking through these scenarios now instead of scrambling to fix them after launch.
The founders who build successful products aren't the ones with the best happy path - they're the ones who anticipated and designed for everything that could go wrong along the way.
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