Field notes
What a first-session path looks like when we sit with it
A first-session path is not “onboarding.” Onboarding is a set of screens someone designed. The first session is whatever actually happened after install, including the skip, the permission refusal, and the person who backgrounded the app during a loading state.
In a recent briefing we used a printed strip of screens: welcome, a three-page tour, a notification prompt, an empty list, and a plus button that created the first item. The team called everything before the plus button onboarding. Recordings showed people skipping the tour, refusing the prompt, and still creating an item — then never returning to the empty list because the list now had a row and the plus button had moved.
The conversion step they cared about was “first item saved.” The path that led there was shorter than the designed onboarding and longer than the event onboarding_complete implied. We wrote the first session as the sequence people took, then marked the designed tour as optional material that a later drop-off clinic could ignore.
If you book a Conversion Path Audit on a first session, bring the skip paths. A path that only documents the happy tour is a brochure.