Onboarding and activationPeople sign up and stall.

New users signed up to get something done. If the first session asks for a lot of setup before it gives anything back, many of them leave before they find out what the product does for them. I shorten the distance between signing up and the first useful result.

Start a project

Where it shows up

People finish signup and stop at setup or an empty screen.
The first session explains every feature and never says what to do next.
Welcome emails go out on a schedule and ignore what the user has done.
You count completed setups and can’t say which users got value.

What a project covers

A map of the first useful result: I trace the path from signup to the first thing a user gets out of the product, and mark every step that asks for effort before it gives something back.
A shorter first session: Setup flow, empty states, guidance and copy, redesigned so the next step is always obvious. Welcome messages get tied to what the user has and hasn’t done.
An activation event you can measure: We pick the action that best stands for a user getting value, define the events and cohorts to track it, and check how it relates to people coming back.
The build: Designs, copy, tracking and front-end work, shipped by me or handed to your team as a spec. We agree who does what before I start.

Where I’ve done it

The Sandbox

UX consultant, 2021.

I redesigned the marketplace, homepage and onboarding, working from heatmaps, session recordings and user interviews. Bounce rate fell 40%. That number measures people staying past the first page. It doesn’t measure activation or retention.

Fluent

Product and ad ops intern, 2018.

A/B tests I ran on sign-up flows, for sites taking more than 900,000 registrations a day, added $1.4M in annualized revenue.

What the research supports, and what it doesn’t

Holds up

Effort speeds up as a goal gets closer. Café customers bought coffee more often as their loyalty card filled up, and a card that started with two bonus stamps was finished faster than a blank one needing the same ten purchases.
Kivetz, Urminsky & Zheng, 2006
Asking people to pick a time for the next step helps them follow through. A mailing that prompted employees to write down a date and time for a flu shot raised vaccination by 4.2 points, from 33.1%.
Milkman et al., 2011

Doesn’t hold up

“People remember unfinished tasks better,” the usual argument for incomplete-profile meters. A 2025 meta-analysis found no memory advantage. People do tend to go back and finish interrupted tasks, which is a reason to save their place.
Ghibellini & Meier, 2025
“Menus should have seven items, plus or minus two.” That was a rough 1956 estimate of memory span and was never about what is visible on a screen. The current estimate of the span is about four.
Miller, 1956; Cowan, 2001

References

Kivetz, R., Urminsky, O., & Zheng, Y. (2006). The goal-gradient hypothesis resurrected: Purchase acceleration, illusionary goal progress, and customer retention. Journal of Marketing Research, 43(1), 39–58.
Milkman, K. L., Beshears, J., Choi, J. J., Laibson, D., & Madrian, B. C. (2011). Using implementation intentions prompts to enhance influenza vaccination rates. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(26), 10415–10420.
Ghibellini, R., & Meier, B. (2025). Interruption, recall and resumption: A meta-analysis of the Zeigarnik and Ovsiankina effects. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 12.
Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63(2), 81–97.
Cowan, N. (2001). The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(1), 87–114.

Which is easier for you, 1 or 2?

Book a 30-minute callPick a time on my calendar. Bring the journey that is losing people.Write to meA few lines about the product and where it goes wrong is enough to start.

Or email david@heyspiegel.com