Cutting onboarding drop-off for a healthtech app

Sixty percent of new users never finished setup on a healthtech app, and the team's first instinct was to shorten the flow. Fewer steps seemed like the obvious fix, so two steps were cut before anyone asked what was actually going wrong.

Research showed the problem was not the number of steps, it was the order. The app asked for medical history and account permissions before showing the user anything of value, so people abandoned the flow before they had a reason to trust it.

Reordering the flow around one early, tangible win, and moving the trust-heavy questions to after that moment, halved the drop-off without removing a single step. The fix was sequencing, not simplification.