63% of signups never connect a data source — is that an onboarding problem or a wrong-user problem

Before any redesign, find out where inside the connect flow they stop. "Did not connect" is not one event, it is at least four: never clicked connect, clicked and did not reach the provider, reached the provider and abandoned the consent screen, consented and hit an error on the way back.

Instrument those four. The shape of the answer decides everything. Mass abandonment at the consent screen is a scopes and trust problem. Failures on the callback is a bug you cannot see because it only happens to accounts unlike yours. Never clicking at all is a motivation problem and no amount of design fixes it.

I assumed mine was design for three months. It was a callback error affecting one provider's business accounts.

Give them a filled dashboard before you ask for anything. Sample data, a demo workspace, a read-only tour with realistic numbers in it — whatever lets them see the thing working before they hand over access.

An empty state is a request for trust from someone who has seen nothing yet. Once they have clicked through a populated view and understood what they get, the connect step stops being an act of faith and becomes an obvious next action. This was the single biggest change I have made to activation, bigger than every copy edit combined.

Second thing: ask for the narrowest scope that lets you show one useful screen, and expand later when they want the feature that needs it.

Also check who is signing up. If half your signups are from a directory listing or a launch post, two thirds not connecting is the directory's fault, not your onboarding's. Segment activation by acquisition source before you rewrite anything a third time.

There is a cheap way to answer your actual question. Email the non-connectors. Not a drip campaign, a plain personal message from your own address asking what stopped them, sent to thirty of them by hand.

Expect maybe three to six replies out of thirty. In my experience the replies split roughly into thirds: I was just looking, I could not work out how, and I did not want to give you that access. Those three groups need three completely different responses and you cannot design for all of them at once. Whichever third is biggest tells you what to build.

One small thing that moved my number more than it should have: telling people what the connection will and will not do, right next to the button, in plain words. Something like "we read your last 90 days, we never post anything, you can disconnect any time and we delete within a day".

I had all of that in a privacy page nobody opened. Moving three sentences of it next to the button was maybe forty minutes of work and it visibly changed the drop-off at the consent screen.