Welcome! Let's set up your account
You're in — now let's get Summit ready for the trail.
Connect your health data
Summit needs Apple Health and your location to continue.
Complete your profile
Account setup complete!
Now let's personalize your trails
What's your fitness level?
You earned the Setup Star badge!
Nice work. Come back tomorrow to earn the Early Bird badge.
Starts at zero — real work discarded
The user just created an account, yet the meter credits nothing. A task not yet begun is a decision; a task in the middle is an obligation — this bar puts them back at the decision.
Loyalty cards pre-stamped 2 of 10 beat empty 8-stamp cards: 34% vs 19% completion — identical real work (Nunes & Drèze 2006)
The expensive step, first
Health data and an always-on location grant before the app has shown anything — while the one-tap question hides at the end of the flow. Front-loading the hard steps is the one bar behavior proven to hurt.
32 randomized experiments: honest constant bars ≈ zero effect; bars that crawl early raised the odds of quitting 56% (Villar, Callegaro & Yang 2013)
Seven fields, one screen
One "efficient" screen carrying seven inputs — and the bar barely moves for all that work. Fields hurt more than steps: splitting them into lighter screens redistributes the same work and buys more visible motion.
Baymard (200,000+ research hours): form-field count hurts usability far more than step count. Obama 2012 split one long donation form into 4 steps: +5% conversion (Kyle Rush)
The stage reset
A celebration — then a second bar sitting at 0%. Every reset re-runs the cold-start penalty the user already paid once.
Our audit (n=47 flows/screens, top iOS apps, Aug 2026): 87% of determinable flows start the user above zero; 14% still reset the bar at a stage boundary
Still counting "% done" at the end
One question from the finish, the label still reads "67% complete." A filled bar only ever shows accumulated progress — the wrong display for the back half, where "1 step left" is the stronger number. (And the cheap one-tap question finally shows up — dead last.)
People respond to whichever number is smaller — done-count early, remaining-count late. Field-tested on 907 customers over 4 months (Koo & Fishbach 2012)
Completion-contingent badge
The flow ends by paying the user a token for finishing — which quietly taxes the motivation they'd otherwise bring back tomorrow.
Completion-contingent rewards: d = -0.36 on later voluntary engagement; informational feedback: +0.33 (Deci, Koestner & Ryan 1999)
Account creation complete.
What's your next summit goal?
One question — it shapes your whole plan.
Get a nudge when it counts?
We'll send two short reminders a week while you train for "Summit a 14,000 ft peak". Nothing else.
Your first trail plan is ready
Built around your goal: Summit a 14,000 ft peak
Good morning, Kris
Day 1 · Blue Ridge Overlook · 2.8 mi
The endowed start
Same flow, but the account the user just created is pre-credited as real, completed work — the bar opens at 20%, the exact move of the car-wash card's two pre-stamps. Your user didn't arrive out of nowhere: they found you, tapped, typed an email, picked a password. That's work — count it. The tooltip on the percentage shows the math.
Cards pre-stamped 2 of 10 beat empty 8-stamp cards: 34% vs 19% completion, identical work — and finishers came back ~3 days sooner (Nunes & Drèze 2006)
The cheapest step, first
No bank-connection-style asks up front. A one-tap question opens the flow, and that single tap moves the bar 20% to 40% — big, honest movement early, exactly where the BEFORE flow put its permission wall. Now they're in motion: completion bias and sunk cost start working for you instead of against you — they've started, it feels like momentum, and they've already invested too much to walk.
The framing flip
Early, the label counts what's done — "2 of 5 done." Past halfway it flips to what's left — "2 steps left." Watch the line under the bar change between these two screens. A standard filled bar only ever shows accumulated progress, which makes it the wrong display for the back half of your own flow.
People respond to whichever number is smaller — done-count early, remaining-count late. Field-tested on 907 sushi-restaurant customers, replicated in the lab (Koo & Fishbach 2012)
The end spurt
People speed up as the finish line comes into view — Hull's goal gradient (his 1934 runway rats ran fastest in the last six feet). A user one step from done is the easiest user you will ever have — so the last setup step here is using the product: "1 step left — your first hike."
Café punch cards (949 cards, ~10,000 purchases): coffees came 20% faster at the end of the card than the beginning (Kivetz, Urminsky & Zheng 2006)
A receipt, not a badge
Completion is confirmed as information — your tracking works from day one — not paid out as a token reward.
Completion-contingent rewards: d = -0.36 on later voluntary engagement; informational feedback: +0.33 (Deci, Koestner & Ryan 1999)
One continuous journey
No second zero. The meter that opened at 20% is the same meter that hits 100% the moment Day 1 begins — the app lands straight on the plan the user chose. Fewer, lighter, continuous steps is the whole rebuild.
Monzo rebuilt signup from 39 screens and 210 taps to 17 and 74 — completion went 9% to 40% (Monzo engineering, 2024)