The Context
It is hard to create a subtle sense of shared space among several people on the web. You and I are in an asynchronous exchange. I wrote these words in the past. You are reading them later.
Most of the web is still designed for slow-loading, single-player experiences. We lack the qualities of shared physical space: a sense of direction, an awareness of the people near us, and chances for unplanned conversation.
We do not need constant interaction. The quiet companionship of reading next to someone in a cafe is what is missing.
The Pattern
Teaching Empty States is the sensation of sharing a space with other people without directly interacting with them. You are aware of each other through peripheral signals, but you are not doing the same task.
The others rarely demand your attention. They exist nearby and do whatever they are doing.
Multiplayer Cursors
The current attempt at this is multiplayer cursors. Other people appear as small coloured pointers in a document, canvas, or spreadsheet. See Shared Cursors
Showing where collaborators are looking and working in real time
Cursors add a sense of shared activity, but they do not scale. A hundred pointers in one file is noise. A softer signal, closer to a heatmap, would serve large groups better. Tools such as PartyKit make these experiments cheap.
Annotations and Trails
Marks left on public pages are less synchronous, but they give a peripheral sense of other people. A few products explore this:
1. Shared margins
A browser extension lets you highlight and take notes on any page. It works as an annotation layer over the web that everyone shares.
2. Popular highlights
Some publishing platforms show the single most highlighted line of an article. It is a small signal, but it tells you other people were here.
The balance between drawing attention to other people and offering quiet company is hard. We manage it in physical rooms. We should keep trying in digital ones.