Onboarding flow audit
Signup through first project creation
app.fictionaltask.io — signup through first project creation
The bones are good — the product clearly works — but the onboarding flow asks too much of the user too early, and several key moments rely on copy that either misleads or under-explains. A confused user on day one is a churned user by day seven.
I went through this onboarding three times — once to orient myself, twice more to make sure I wasn't imagining things. The sign-up is clean. The workspace naming step is fine. But there are two moments in this flow that will lose people, and they're both fixable. The empty state is the biggest problem: it tells you to do something with a button that doesn't do what you think it does. I spent six minutes on that screen. The second is the email verification gate, which interrupts momentum at exactly the wrong time. Everything else is small stuff — friction, not failure.
Landed on the sign-up page and it felt immediately familiar in a good way. Name, email, password. No surprises. I did pause on the password field —
there’s a strength indicator that appears but doesn’t tell you the actual rules
, so I typed something and watched the bar fill up without knowing why. Minor thing, but I kept second-guessing myself.
Submitted the form and hit a wall. Full-page “check your email” screen with no way forward. The email took about 90 seconds to arrive. That 90 seconds felt like five minutes because there was nothing to do. I opened the email, clicked the link, came back — and landed on the sign-up page again instead of the workspace setup. Had to log in from scratch. That broke the experience completely.
Once I logged back in — after the email verification redirect fail — I landed here. Name your workspace. Upload a logo if you want. This was fine. Clean, simple, no surprises. I did spend a moment wondering what a “workspace” actually is in the context of this product, but the subtext helped. The “you can change this later” note was reassuring.
This is where things went sideways.
I landed on the dashboard, saw the empty state, and read “Get started by creating your first project.”
The button said “Get started.” I clicked it. It opened a modal to invite teammates. That is not what “get started” means to someone who just wants to create a project. I closed the modal, looked around, couldn’t find a “create project” button for a while. It’s in the sidebar. No label — just an icon. I hovered over it for confirmation. This section took me six minutes.
Once I found the create button and got into the modal, things improved considerably. Name the project, pick a color, optionally choose a template. The template picker is a standout — it’s actually useful, with real-looking examples. I spent time here in a good way, browsing the options. The “start from scratch” option was appropriately de-emphasized without being hidden.
Overall notes
The two critical findings — the email verification redirect and the empty state CTA mismatch — are worth addressing before anything else. Both will cause real abandonment and both are low-effort to fix. The email redirect is probably a bug more than a design problem. The empty state copy is a design problem that someone made a specific choice about, and it’s the wrong choice.
Outside of those two things, the product itself seems solid. The template picker suggests real thought went into onboarding — it just didn’t make it all the way to the empty state. The progress indicator is genuinely good and should be preserved. The sign-up form is clean.
If I had to rank priorities: fix the verification redirect, rewrite the empty state CTA, label the sidebar create button on first session, add a post-project-creation prompt. Everything else is polish.