We rebuilt the first minutes of Prior
Release 1.15.0 replaces the spaces picker and the slide tour with one question, your own first tasks and a page that teaches Prior in short chapters.
The first minutes of an app decide whether people come back, and ours were not good. Before release 1.15.0 a new account went through five screens before it saw the app. It was asked to choose which spaces it wanted from a list of words it did not know yet, such as Eisenhower, Pomodoro and spaced repetition. Then Today showed four ways to add a task and a Pro banner. A three-gesture guide followed, and then nothing.
We rebuilt it. This post says what we changed and why.
What we read
Our starting point was how little tutorials seem to help. Nielsen Norman Group tested the deck-of-cards tutorials of four mobile apps with 70 people. Task success was similar between people who read the tutorial and people who skipped it (91% and 94%), and the readers rated the tasks as harder. The authors advise caution with tutorials in apps like these and point to contextual help as an alternative.
That is one test of one kind of tutorial, so we treated it as a reason to question ours, not as a rule. It matched a concern of our own: the old picker asked you to judge spaces by name before you had used any of them.
What a new account sees now
- One question. What do you need help with? The answers are planning my days, building habits, studying, running projects, keeping notes, staying focused, or Just my to-do list. Several answers are allowed and none is required. We no longer ask for a name, a language or a theme: they come from the sign-up and the device.
- Your own tasks. What do you have to do? This is the real quick-add field, so the first tasks are real tasks. The words Prior reads, like "tomorrow 3pm", light up, and each captured task shows the date Prior understood. People coming from Todoist, Linear or Notion get a link to the import.
- Today, with only the essentials. The navigation holds Today, All tasks and the spaces that match your answers, plus Discover. Until you have done three chapters or a week has passed, Today is quick add and your list, without the extra buttons. The Pro banner is gone from Today for everyone.
- A short tutorial on real gestures. It follows right after: write a task, open it to give it a day or a priority, check it off. Each step completes when you really do it. The guide is not modal: nothing is dimmed and the page stays usable.
People who join through an invitation see one screen with the invitation, then a confirmation before joining. They get no goals question and no tutorial. People who sign up from a shared flashcard deck skip everything and land in the deck.
Discover
The rest of Prior is taught on a page called Discover, which you open when you want to. It has chapters, each with at most three gestures on your own data: group tasks into projects, see what matters first, plan your week, build habits, focus on one thing, keep notes, learn with flashcards, work with others, ask Prior AI, go faster, turn email into tasks, follow up with people, run sprints and track a budget. A chapter starts when you click it, and a coach mark points at the right control.
Two other pieces use the same idea of help that follows your work:
- One suggestion at a time. At the bottom of Today, Prior can offer a line based on your own tasks: for example that you have 8 tasks and no project yet, with a button to group them. Once you close or try it, it does not return, and the next one waits 24 hours.
- Calm or Game, after your first win. We ask whether you want XP, a pet and weekly leagues only after you complete a task, not before you have seen the app.
The spaces picker, the Getting started list and the tip cards are gone. Older accounts keep their navigation and their Today as they were.
What we do not know
We have not published any measurement of the new first run against the old one, and this post makes no claim about one. We can say what we removed and what we built in its place. If you sign up and something in the first minutes confuses you, that is useful to us: write to us.
The details are in Your first day in Prior and Discover.