From one big button to three intent-based doors.

The first screen a trial user saw — and didn't act on.

The first-time dashboard is a small but disproportionately important surface. It's the screen a trial user lands on right after signup — before they've created anything, before they've explored the editor, before they've made up their mind about the product. Whatever they do next on this screen is the strongest predictor of whether they'll convert to paid.

The version that existed when I picked up the project did one thing: it showed a single, prominent "Create page" CTA. Internally, this was the right answer to the wrong question. The right question wasn't "what action do we want them to take?" — it was "what action are they ready to take?"

The numbers showed the gap. Internal events placed the share of trial users who took a meaningful first action from the dashboard at around 2%. The PRD set a goal of ~10%, with a downstream target of lifting trial-to-paid conversion from ~2.5% toward ~3.5%. The dashboard was the lever — but only if it stopped asking trial users to commit before they were oriented.

Users weren't ignoring the button. They were walking around it.

The diagnosis came from looking at where users went instead. Pulling sidebar-click events alongside the dashboard-CTA-click events showed a pattern: users who landed on the dashboard frequently clicked into the Landing Pages tab in the sidebar — and created their first page from there. The dashboard was being treated as a way station, not a starting point. The CTA wasn't being ignored; the entire screen was being bypassed.

Three things were happening at once:

• Single-CTA fatigue. A trial user 30 seconds into a product they've never seen does not feel ready to "create" anything. A button that asks them to commit feels premature. Users prefer to look around first.
• The dashboard wasn't telling them what was possible. The button said "Create page" — but it didn't say what kinds of pages, what use cases, what would happen on the other side of the click. It was a leap of faith with no preview.
• The Landing Pages tab won by accident. That tab had templates, filters, and a sense of place — it gave users somewhere to browse before they had to commit. The dashboard, comparatively, felt like a homepage with a single front door.

Three intent-based doors, not one.

I framed the redesign around a simple idea: different trial users arrive with different levels of clarity. Some know exactly what they want to build. Some know roughly — they have a campaign type or industry in mind. Some don't know yet and need to see options before they pick. The dashboard had to serve all three without asking any of them to commit too early.

So instead of one CTA, three doors — each calibrated to a different level of intent.

The three doors share one piece of state: the filter system. Pick a quick chip and the corresponding dropdown checkbox flips; uncheck the dropdown and the chip deactivates. This bidirectional sync is small but load-bearing — without it, the user notices an inconsistency the moment they cross between the two filter UIs, and the whole thing starts to feel broken.

What I argued for — and what I argued against.

Four calls shaped Phase 1. The interesting ones, as usual, are the ones we cut.

The dashboard, redrawn.

Five pieces of the design are worth seeing — the hero banner, the filter bar with both UIs visible, the pinned template grid, the hover state on a template card, and the empty state. Image placeholders below; final images will be added once publication consent is in place.

Doubled in 30 days.

Phase 1 went out via a staged rollout with internal events tracking every door. The headline number — share of trial-user dashboard sessions with at least one meaningful action — roughly doubled in the 30 days post-launch.

Two things underneath the headline:

• The doors got used differently. The hero CTA carried high-intent users; quick-filter chips carried medium-intent users (especially "Lead Generation" and "Webinar Signups"); the pinned template grid carried users who scrolled before clicking. None of the three doors dominated. That distribution itself was evidence the redesign was reading users correctly.
• Sidebar exits dropped. Fewer trial users were leaving the dashboard to find page creation elsewhere. The dashboard had become the place to start, not just a place to pass through.

What I'd do differently.

Three things I'd change next time.

• Run a small prototype test before shipping the three-doors thesis. The hypothesis was strong and the analytics supported it, but a 30-minute moderated session with 5 trial users on a Figma prototype would have caught two minor copy issues we noticed only post-launch.
• Surface the cost of inaction earlier in the PM/leadership conversation. "Only 2% take an action" lands harder than "the activation funnel needs work." Framing the existing baseline as a missed opportunity made the case for a redesign — but I should have done that on day one, not week three.
• Design the second-time dashboard at the same time. We deliberately gated the new view to zero-page users, which was the right call for shipping speed. But the moment a trial user creates their first page, they get dropped back into the standard dashboard — which has its own issues. Phase 2 picks that up; in retrospect, sketching both states in parallel would have made the seam less abrupt.