[Empty States] resolve outstanding design spec decisions

[laurenmrice]

Acceptance criteria

There are a few design decisions below that still need to resolved for Empty states. It would be good to have these in order before finalizing website documentation guidance and this may help inform us if this is defined as a component or pattern.

---

Text and illustration alignment

• Create a final stance of when text and illustrations of empty states are left or centered aligned.
  • Note: I believe the workgroup was saying to just always center align in every scenario instead of being choosy to make the guidelines easier and more straightforward. Need to confirm this direction.
• When can you have both text and illustration and when should you only have text? Are there any considerations of when to use one or the other? Should it always be consistent if you have multiple empty states in one page?

Buttons and links

• How many buttons should be included in an empty state? Does this depend on the component the empty state is on? Is it bad to have multiple call to action buttons in one empty state scenario that are different styles of buttons?
• Should we allow links?

Text max width

• Finalize a text max width across different components for empty states. We have decided it for data table,but what about smaller spaces, like in cards or side panels?

Types of empty state

• Determine if empty states should be categorised and, if so, define the types (e.g., First Use, No Data, Error States).
• Decide if First Use and Error States should be considered as empty states or treated separately.

Are there any more?

In parallel:

• Go through the Slack threads.
• Refer to Tracey's pagination workstream.

---

Playback

• Playback decisions to design team and get feedback.
• Playback decisions to workgroup and get feedback.

[github-actions]

Thank you for submitting a feature request. Your proposal is open and will soon be triaged by the Carbon team.

If your proposal is accepted and the Carbon team has bandwidth they will take on the issue, or else request you or other volunteers from the community to work on this issue.