Loomly · Growth · 2022
Halving onboarding drop-off
The signup flow wasn't broken. The promise before it was.
- Role
- Design manager
- Team
- 2 designers, 4 engineers
- Duration
- 5 months
- Year
- 2022
Growth wanted a shorter signup form. The data said the form wasn't where people left.
Reframing the brief
The ask was 'make signup shorter'. Funnel data showed 71% of drop-off happened after signup, on the empty state.
People finished signing up, saw a blank workspace, and had no idea what the product was for. Shortening the form would have moved that cliff, not removed it.
Designing the first five minutes
We treated the empty state as the real onboarding. New accounts arrived with a worked example built from the answers they'd already given.
- One question during signup, used immediately and visibly
- A sample project seeded with their own data, deletable in one click
- Progressive disclosure: three features on day one, the rest earned
Shipping in slices
Five releases, each behind a flag, each with one hypothesis. Two lost. We kept them shipped for a fortnight anyway to see whether the loss held.
One of them reversed by week three — the change was good, the copy was bad.
What changed
- day-7 activation
- 34% → 61%
- drop-off on first session
- −51%
- experiments lost — and stayed shipped long enough to learn why
- 2 of 5
day-7 activation
drop-off on first session
experiments lost — and stayed shipped long enough to learn why
What I’d do differently
Taking the brief literally would have shipped the wrong thing on time. Ask what the number is before you agree what the work is.