How to bring new users into a product so they reach value quickly — flow design, empty states, contextual guidance, and the metrics that matter most.
View All TagsRetention is the metric everyone talks about. Activation is the metric that decides whether retention even gets a chance to matter.
If a user signs up, opens your product, and doesn't get to the thing they came for inside the first minute, the rest of the funnel is academic. They don't churn — they evaporate. You won't see them in your retention dashboard because they were never there long enough to count.
Walk into any SaaS product built between 2014 and 2022 and you'll meet the same houseguest: a five-step tour that interrupts you the moment you sign in, pointing arrows at things you haven't asked about and didn't know you needed.
The tour exists because someone — usually someone senior — argued, correctly, that users don't know how to use the product. Then someone else — usually someone in design — built the obvious solution: show them. The tour is the fossil of an honest impulse.
It still doesn't work.
Open any product on its first day of use and the first thing you see is a screen with nothing on it. No projects yet. No reports yet. No teammates yet. The empty state.
For most teams, the empty state is the last thing the design org thinks about and the first thing the new user sees. The math is bad.
Tooltips are the most over-deployed and under-edited element in modern product design. Every product has hundreds of them. Most products would be improved by deleting most of them.
The reason tooltips proliferate isn't that they're useful — it's that they're cheap to ship. A tooltip is the answer the team gives when the interface isn't legible enough on its own and the deadline is too close to redesign it.