The app is useless until you connect a data source, which takes an api key and about two minutes. Session recordings show people landing on an empty dashboard, clicking three things, and closing the tab. Median session is about 90 seconds.
So: seed a fake demo workspace so there is something to look at, or make the empty state harder to ignore? I can only build one of these this month.
Third option that beat both for me: let them paste one real thing. One url, one csv row, one invoice, whatever the smallest unit of their data is, straight into a box on the empty screen, and give them real output in under ten seconds. No api key, no oauth, no account linking.
Demo data can make the product feel like a showroom - polished and clearly not about them. Real input beats it because their data is always weirder than the fixtures you would have written, and the moment they see their own weird data handled properly is the moment they believe you.
And you find out what their weird data actually looks like, which is worth more than the activation bump. Two weeks of pasted samples taught me more about my own parser than six months of my own test fixtures.
Instrument the step, not the session. A 90 second median is a blend of eight second bounces and four minute explorers and tells you nothing about either. Define one activation event, then measure the fraction reaching each step: landed, clicked connect, opened the key dialog, pasted a key, saw first data. The drop is always in one specific place and it is usually not where the designer assumed.
Mine turned out to be that finding the api key required logging into a third party admin panel most users did not have access to. No empty state design would have fixed that.
Ninety seconds and out often means the landing page sold something the first screen does not visibly deliver. Worth reading the two in sequence, page then dashboard, as a stranger would. If the promise in your headline is not visible somewhere in the first screen of the app, the fix is upstream and no amount of demo data patches it.
Show output first, ask for credentials second. Every product with a connect-step graveyard has this backwards.
I added a three item checklist and learned something odd - people completed step one and step three and skipped step two, which was the integration, which was the entire point. Turns out they were doing the easy ones for the satisfaction of the ticks. Moving the integration to the end, after they had already got a small result out of the product, roughly doubled the number who did it. Same three steps, different order.
@leaky_bucket_ed · 2mo ago · 2 replies
Seeded example workspace, clearly labelled, one click to clear. The reason is not that empty states are ugly - it is that your connect step is a price you are charging before you have delivered anything. Nobody goes and finds an api key for a product they have not seen work.
With an example workspace the sequence becomes: see the output, understand why it is good, then be told that connecting your own source takes two minutes. That is a completely different ask because it now has a reason attached.
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@blistermaps · 2mo ago
Label it loudly or you will get support tickets about the fake numbers being wrong. A banner saying 'Example project - your data is not here yet, delete this anytime' fixed that for me, and the delete button doubled as a decent activation signal because people who deleted it were people who intended to connect something.
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