Between July and September 2022 I was one of two designers on Mentor Buddies, a mobile app by Design Buddies, one of the largest design communities. It matched members with expert mentors for a short private chat in exchange for a donation to the mentor's chosen charity. The app had already run a beta, and its dashboard reported 1.9% of new users starting a mentor chat.
The onboarding flow demanded a filled-out profile before anyone could see who they might talk to. That ordering is the subject of this piece.
Finding where they left
The analytics gave us the where before the interviews gave us the why. Three screens accounted for most of the loss: the welcome screen lost 35% of arrivals, profile creation lost 66% of those remaining, and the mentor list lost 66% again.
To get at the why, I interviewed eight community members and ran affinity mapping on their feedback in FigJam, tagging every comment to the screen it referred to and clustering the tags. Four pain points survived the clustering:
- Users weren't invested enough to hand over personal information at account creation.
- The welcome screen was a wall of text; people couldn't tell how the app worked.
- The mentor list was overwhelming.
- Matching felt neither accurate nor personal.
The first one is the one that matters, because it isn't a UI problem. It's a sequencing problem: the app asked for commitment before it had shown anyone the thing they came for.
The uncomfortable fix
The instinctive response to a failing profile form is to improve the form — fewer fields, better copy, a progress indicator. We did some of that. The change that actually addressed the pain point was structural: an alternative path that skips profile creation entirely and drops the user straight into the mentor list.
That was not an easy sell. A profile is data, and data feels like the business model. The argument that won used the same data pointed the other way: a 66% drop on that one screen meant the profile requirement was costing two-thirds of the remaining funnel to protect information we could collect later, from people who by then had a reason to give it. Once someone has browsed mentors and wants to book a session, the profile stops being a toll booth and becomes a step in a task they already chose.
The other fixes followed the same principle. The text-heavy welcome screens became illustrations explaining the mechanic at a glance — expert chat, fifteen minutes, donation to charity. The mentor list got reviews, self-intros and online-status indicators, so the value being promised was specific rather than abstract.
Testing and the number
I sketched the new flow on paper, holding each screen to no more than two major interaction areas, moved it into a low-fidelity Figma prototype, and ran think-aloud tests with five participants whose task was to get from install to chatting with a mentor. The structure held; what the tests surfaced were fixable details rather than a wrong direction.
After development, the team ran a private beta with 125 community members. That dashboard reported 30.4% starting a mentor chat, 38 of 125, and the drop-off points that had been bleeding the old flow held their traffic.
Read that pair as a before-and-after observation, not an experiment. The cohorts differ in size and period — 834 users across a month in 2020, 125 across two weeks in 2022 — no traffic was split between the two designs, and the earlier dashboard disagrees with its own funnel about the original count.
The full case study
I've kept the original write-up intact rather than re-typing it here. It carries the before and after screens, the revised user flow, the paper sketches, the affinity board and the design-system documentation. Its timeline page is dated a year late; the work ran in 2022, which is what the private beta's own dashboard shows.
What I took from it
Drop-off data tells you where; only users tell you why. The analytics pointed at three screens. The interviews explained that one of them wasn't a screen problem at all.
The best onboarding step is often the one you make optional. Every mandatory step is a bet that its value to you exceeds its cost in abandoned users. At a 66% drop, that bet was losing, and moving the step later in the journey converted it from a barrier into a formality.
Designs survive contact with engineers only if engineers are in the room. With no PM on the team, I worked with the four developers daily, designed edge cases on their request, and kept everything on an 8pt grid so consistency didn't depend on a design system we didn't have. The result belongs to that collaboration as much as to any wireframe.