First, look again.
This is the first screen a brand-new Stride runner sees. Not a settings page. Not a paywall. The welcome — the moment the app has your full attention and your lowest patience. And in that moment, it asks you to do a surprising amount of work.
One screen. Three asks. Zero clarity.
The screen isn't ugly — that's what makes it sneaky. The real issue is that it stacks three unrelated requests on top of each other and gives them roughly equal weight.
A wall of "track every run, follow plans, join challenges, sync your watch…" It sells you the whole app before you've used any of it. You skim it, feel vaguely guilty for skimming, and move on.
Buried under the welcome text, styled to look like terms & conditions, is a pre-ticked box signing you up for marketing. It's a real decision disguised as fine print — the kind you only notice after you've agreed to it.
A dashed box adds a fourth path. Most new users don't have a code, but now they're wondering: should I? Am I missing a discount? If I tap this, did I still opt into emails?
"Create account" and "Log in" carry nearly identical visual weight, so even the primary action isn't obvious. Add "Continue with Google" underneath and the single most important tap is competing with four other things.
You're doing the app's thinking for it.
Designers call this cognitive load — the mental effort a screen demands from the person using it. Every extra choice, every ambiguous label, every "wait, what does this do?" spends a little of the user's attention. And attention is the one thing a first-time user has almost none of.
Stride front-loads that cost at the worst possible moment. Instead of "great, let's run," the new user feels "ugh, paperwork." Some push through. Many quietly close the app. That drop-off never shows up as an angry review — it just shows up as a number.
Every time someone interacts with a product, they run these four steps — in this order:
Stride fails at step one — filtering: there's too much to filter, so seek and act get expensive, and store leaves a bad taste.
One screen, one decision.
The fix isn't prettier buttons or a nicer illustration. It's removing decisions.
When a screen feels cluttered, the answer usually isn't better styling. It's fewer decisions.
