A common onboarding problem
New users open your app to a blank screen
The short answer: start them mid-task. Here is how to recognise this problem in your funnel, why it happens, and how the best consumer apps design it away.
How to recognise it
- First sessions ending inside a minute with no action taken
- A home screen whose main message is “No items yet”
- Heatmaps showing taps wandering with no clear first move
Why do empty first screens lose new users?
Every new account has a cold-start problem: the app is at its emptiest at the exact moment it most needs to impress.
A blank dashboard, an empty library, a canvas with a plus button. To you it reads as potential. To a first-time user it reads as “this app has nothing”, and it quietly hands all the work of getting started to the one person least equipped to do it.
People do not abandon empty apps because they are lazy. They abandon them because nothing on the screen suggests a good first move, and a blank screen never sells what the product looks like at its best.
How do you fix a blank first-run experience? Start them mid-task
Never let the first screen depend entirely on what the user has done, because at minute one they have done nothing.
Pre-fill what you can: a sample project to poke at, a starter playlist, a feed seeded from three taste questions. Editing something is a smaller ask than creating it, and a half-built start makes progress feel already underway.
Where content genuinely cannot be pre-built, design the empty state as an open door instead of a dead end: show what belongs in the space, and put the first action one tap away.
The test worth running: could a brand-new user, in their first thirty seconds, see roughly what this app looks like when it is working well? If not, the first screen has a job it is not doing.
The building blocks that solve it
- Setup Defaults: Never open on a blank screen: pre-fill, pre-build, pre-load.
- Momentum Bias: Start flows at step two, so progress feels already underway.
- Empty States: Turn every empty screen into an open door, not a dead end.
Who does this well
Pinterest: Three taps on topics and the feed is already full. You arrive at a working product, not a promise of one.
Spotify: A new account starts with ready-made playlists, so the first screen plays music instead of asking you to build a library.
Questions founders ask
What makes a good empty state?
It answers two questions at a glance: what belongs here, and what do I do about it right now.
That usually means a line of copy written around the user's goal, a visual hint of the filled state, and one obvious action. “No items found” answers neither question, which is why it reads as a dead end.
Does demo or sample content actually help activation?
Often, when it is clearly labelled as a sample and takes one tap to replace with the user's own. It gives people something to react to, which is easier than imagining.
It backfires when it gets in the way: sample data mixed in with real data, or a template that takes longer to clear than starting fresh would have.