Empty State Onboarding

The screen right after signup has nothing on it. For years what sat there was a single grey line saying there are no documents yet. From the builder's side that's an accurate sentence. To someone opening the product for the first time, it's a screen that doesn't say what to do next.

So the numbers bend here. Of 100 people who sign up, 34 create a first document, and tracing where the other 66 stopped usually puts them at this screen with the tab closed. They left without using the product once, which means they never reach activation, the point where a new user first feels what the product is for.

What makes this spot unusual is that every new user passes through it without exception. Fixing one screen reaches all of them, which makes it the piece of onboarding work where results show up fastest.

Start by picking the one action to ask for. Five steps.

1. Pick a single action, like creating a first document. Offer three side by side and choosing becomes work, so people do none of them and leave.
2. Put the button for that action in the middle of the screen, large. Move the grey explanation below it or delete it.
3. Lay out templates. Three of them — meeting notes, a spec, a weekly update — lower the barrier more than a blank page does. Ten is enough to stall someone, so stay under three or four.
4. Write one line on why the screen is empty and what changes once it isn't: make a document and your team can edit the same page together, for instance. Show the payoff before asking for the work.
5. Measure what share of people who land on this screen press the button. That rate is the whole result of the work, and it's the number to quote when someone asks whether the change helped.

Setup that spans several steps belongs to an onboarding checklist. This screen carries only the first step, and the rest comes out after that step is done.

"There's one grey line here. Let's start with a button."

Treat the empty screen as a place to ask for an action rather than a place to describe a state.

"Three templates, not ten. Ten and they close the tab picking."

More options is interference here, not help.

"Signups are up and first-document rate hasn't moved."

The block isn't acquisition, it's this first screen.

At Pagedeck, Noa rebuilt this screen. Removing the "no documents" line, centering a create button, and laying three templates under it moved the first-document rate from 34 percent to 51 percent.

Mia pulled the product tour tooltips off the same screen at the same time. When a button and a speech bubble talk at once, neither one gets read, and the one that loses is usually the button.