Stride · Onboarding teardown

Same app. Two front doors.

Tap through both flows. The AFTER flow arrives pre-answered with the most common picks — change any answer and watch the plan update.

9:41

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Pick your training plan

12 plans available. No default selected.

Tell us about your running

…10 more questions…

questions 4–13, none skippable

How did you hear about us?

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1

The blank screen is an invoice

Four empty fields — two of them passwords — before the app has shown anything, under a button that stays dead until all the work is done. And the placeholders are the labels: they vanish the moment you type.

Roughly 1 in 3 people who see a form never type a single character; the password field is the highest-abandonment field of all (Zuko, 93M form views)
2

Choice overload, on purpose

Twelve near-identical plans, nothing preselected. All four overload conditions stack here: the user is minimizing effort, the options are hard to compare, they're in a spare ninety seconds, and they don't yet know what they want.

24 jams drew 60% of shoppers but converted 3%; 6 jams drew 40% and converted 30% — ten times better (Iyengar & Lepper 2000)
3

Hidden options, summoned keyboards

Two dropdowns you must open just to find out what the question is, and a blank number field that summons the keyboard over the form.

Never make someone open a thing to find out what's inside it, if there are only three things inside it — and never show an input mode you could have deleted (a stepper needs no keyboard)
4

Questions that change nothing

Ten more questions, then "How did you hear about us?" If picking an answer doesn't change a single thing about what happens next, it isn't a form field — it's a survey you're charging your users to fill out.

If you can't name what changes based on the answer, cut it
BEFORE
17 screens, 5 blank fields
1 / 17
9:41
Stride

Let's build your first week

Three quick questions. No account needed.

1 of 3

What's your goal?

Prefilled with the most common pick — change it in one tap.

2 of 3

Which days work best?

The most common trio is prefilled — tap to change.

3 of 3

What time do you usually have free?

Morning is preselected — it's when most runs happen.

Goal: Run my first 5K

Your Week 1 plan

Beginner-friendly 3 runs · your days, your time

One tap saves your plan — no password to invent, none to reset.

Tuesday, 7:00 AM

— want a reminder before your first run?

5

Every answer arrives prefilled

A default isn't read as a placeholder — it's read as advice: this is what people like you chose. It turns an open-ended decision into a cheap yes-or-no. Smart default = the most common answer; sleazy default = the most profitable one.

Auto-enrollment took 401k participation from 37% to 86% — and 61% kept both default settings, vs ~1% who ever picked that combination unaided (Madrian & Shea 2001)
6

Kill the password

The CTA is alive and shows the payoff, and saving is one tap — no password to invent, remember, or reset. (The honest trade: Auth0's logs put social login at ~14% of actual logins, and social-login users show slightly shorter tenure. Lower friction, slightly less-committed users — make it knowingly.)

Up to 19% of checkout abandonment among existing account holders traces to password resets (Baymard). Google is 73%+ of social logins — and adding it triggers Apple guideline 4.8: offer Sign in with Apple too
7

The primed permission ask

A custom screen quoting your own plan — before the one-shot system dialog ever fires. Compare the raw alert in the BEFORE flow:

Our audit (n=35 flows, top iOS apps, Aug 2026): 90% of notification asks are primed; only 25% of quiz flows allow skipping
AFTER
6 screens, 0 blank fields
1 / 6

Tap the primary button in each phone (or the chevrons and dots) to walk the flows. Numbered pins mark the moves — tap one to see the evidence.