The first screen a dealer ever sees was the one nobody had looked at. Opened
fresh, with nothing saved, the tool showed:
* the word EMPTY, in capitals, ten times across the felt
* Resolve Pot as the accent-green primary — on a table with no players and no
pot, so the loudest control on screen was the one that could do least
* Next Hand, with no button to move
* no indication anywhere of what to do first, except a grey caption under the
felt saying "tap a seat to edit"
An empty state is the one screen a new user is guaranteed to meet, and this one
described itself ten times without once saying what to do.
**The felt stops repeating itself.** An open chair is already dashed instead of
solid, faded, and has no stack under it — that reads at a glance, which is how a
dealer looks at a felt, and it reads the same on the one open chair at a full
table, which is the case the label was actually for. The word is gone from all
ten, and the seat numbers underneath it are now the thing you see. What the word
carried for anyone reading by ear moves to an aria-label on the seat, which now
says more than the sighted version ever did: "Seat 3, empty", "Seat 1, Ann".
**The bar says what the table is.** It used to hide itself when nobody was
seated — silent at exactly the moment a dealer has never used this before. It
now says "Nobody's at the table yet." with one full-width button, Seat a player,
which opens the seat editor on the first free chair. That is the same panel
tapping a seat gives them, so the button teaches the gesture rather than
replacing it.
**Two dead controls stop pretending.** Resolve Pot and Next Hand are disabled
until somebody is at the table, which takes the accent green off the button that
cannot work and leaves the only green on screen on the one that can. Disabled
rather than hidden: hiding them would move the header the moment the first
player is named, and a control that vanishes teaches nothing about what it was
for. Next Hand's own explanatory title is kept and handed back when it
re-enables.
One bug of my own, found by walking the flow rather than by reading it: after
typing a name both header buttons stayed greyed out, still captioned "nobody is
at the table yet". commitSeatChange refreshes narrowly on purpose — a full
render on every keystroke takes the name field out from under the dealer
mid-word — and the comment directly above it already warns about this exact trap
for the action bar. The header needed the same line.
609 tests, 0 failures. 65 layout audits across 13 viewports x 5 table sizes,
0 failures — the empty table is now one of those sizes, and had never been
audited before. Re-verified with the network cut: the first-run screen, the CTA
and seating a player all work offline.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015bnp7xKUPFFSpwkYNFaPgb
jheapsandClaude Opus 5
3ffce9d7c1