Activation walkthrough
A slow walk from install to the first useful action, counted in taps, waits, and backtracks.
George Town · first-open hours
On a Tuesday morning we watched twelve people open the same grocery app for the first time. Nine of them never reached the home shelf. The pause lived on a location prompt that looked harmless in the design file.
The first hour after install, written down in George Town
We work with Malaysian product teams who already have an app in the store and still cannot explain why new people leave before the first useful action. Our work is sitting, timing, interviewing, and writing.
What we actually sit with
Desktop Garden is a small onboarding analytics studio. We do not sell a meter or a monthly seat. We review the first session: account walls, permission sheets, empty states, and the language that asks a newcomer to stay.
First-open review
A timed sitting with twelve first sessions, mapped to the screens that actually stop people.
Newcomer interviews
Six conversations with people who installed this week, aimed at the sentence they could not finish on screen.
Welcome-copy sitting
A half-day rewrite of the first five screens, using the words newcomers already said.
A briefing, not a scoreboard
After a visit you receive a written first-week briefing: timestamped moments, quotes from newcomers, and a short list of changes that fit the next release. We leave the backlog ranking to your team.
“They timed the silence after our camera prompt. We had argued about icon weight for a month. The silence was the actual leak.”Aisha Rahman, product lead, Penang grocery app