Part Two: The product · Getting good
A blank canvas offers freedom. People cannot aim at good work they have never seen.
A newcomer looking at an empty canvas and fifty tools has two problems. They do not know how to use the tools, and they do not know what a good result looks like. Documentation answers the first. Almost nothing answers the second. Makers rarely notice, because to them the blank page shows that the product can do anything.
People learn a standard by seeing finished work, a lot of it. A new cook has eaten good meals. A new writer has read good books. Someone opening a reporting tool for the first time may never have seen a good report made with it, and is expected to produce one.
Canva was built on this. It opens on finished designs, sorted by what a person came to make: a poster, a menu, an invitation. A blank design is there for anyone who wants one. Most people start from something that already works and change it until it is theirs.
This applies where the work has a standard to reach: a report, a poster, a lesson plan, a rota. In a notebook or a code editor the empty page is the point, and filling it with samples would be an intrusion.
Examples go wrong when they turn into advertising. The gallery fills with showpieces that display every feature and that no newcomer could make or would need. Useful examples are ordinary good work. They are at a level a newcomer can reach soon, and they come from the person's own field. They can be opened and taken apart to see how they were done.
Some worry that examples make everyone's work look alike. At the start, that is fine. People copy first and find their own way later.
Therefore:
Where the work has a standard to reach, offer finished examples of real work, chosen for what the person came to do, that they can open, take apart and change into their own.
In practice. With permission, collect five pieces of good work your customers have actually made. Put them next to your template gallery. If they look nothing alike, the gallery is advertising.
Goes with. Examples show a newcomer THE PROGRESS THEY WANT (2) in a form they can copy. They shorten the time PAST THE AWKWARD STAGE (40), and they should be built from REAL CONTENT FIRST (65).