That's a great area to explore — understanding where new users drop off during onboarding can unlock significant improvements in activation.

Let me play back the key dimensions of this problem space:

• Motivation clarity — Do users understand what value they'll get from completing onboarding?
• Friction points — Where do they get stuck, confused, or frustrated?
• Time/effort perception — Does onboarding feel too long or demanding?
• Confidence — Do users feel capable of creating their first project?
• Relevance — Does the onboarding flow feel applicable to their goals?
• Competing priorities — Are they distracted or planning to "come back later"?

Now, let me suggest a few research questions that could drive this investigation:

Great choice — exploring the gap between expectations and reality often reveals the deepest insights. Users who churned during onboarding likely had a mental model of what would happen, and something didn't match.

Let me check what's available for building your exercise:

Now I have a good sense of what's possible. Here are some exercise ideas that could help surface the expectation vs. reality gap:

Excellent — a journey timeline will let interviewees reconstruct their onboarding experience and mark where their expectations diverged from reality. This will prompt them to narrate their mental state at each step.

Let me build this for you:

Here's your exercise: Onboarding Journey Map

How it works:

• Interviewees see a timeline of typical onboarding steps (Sign Up → First Project → Ready to Go)
• They drag feeling tokens (Excited, Okay, Confused, Frustrated) onto each step they experienced
• For each marked step, they indicate whether it matched their expectations (Yes/No)

What you'll learn:

• The emotional journey through onboarding
• Specific moments where expectations diverged from reality (the "No" answers are gold)
• Patterns across users — e.g., "everyone gets confused at Tutorial but frustrated at First Project"

During the interview: Prompt interviewees to verbalize why they felt that way and what they expected instead — that commentary paired with the visual state will give you rich qualitative data.

Let me know if you'd like to tweak the onboarding steps to match your actual flow, or adjust anything else!