Rewriting Onboarding for Halcyon

The brief

Fifty-one screens of onboarding copy written by six different people over two years. Every screen was clear. Together they were exhausting.

What we did

We rewrote the whole flow around one question, asked at every screen: what is the reader afraid of right now? Fear of losing data, fear of looking stupid, fear of committing to the wrong plan.

Then we cut. Forty-one screens survived. The ten we removed were the ones explaining features nobody had asked about yet.

The result

Activation improved, but the number the team cared about was support tickets during setup — down by just over half.