74% of our users have never completed a profile.
We had a profile completion meter and a nagging banner that followed users until they filled it out. Completion rate after 90 days: 26%.
We removed the meter and the banner for a test group. Completion rate in that group: 24%. Statistically unchanged.
The nagging was doing almost nothing except annoying people.
Then we looked at what actually correlated with profile completion. Users who completed profiles had a specific trigger: they were about to share something with someone outside their team, and the shared view showed their name and photo. The profile was not a setup task. It was a presentation need.
We stopped asking for profile completion at signup and started prompting at the moment of external sharing.
Completion rose to 58%, and the prompts were rated helpful rather than nagging in follow-up surveys.
What are you asking users to complete at a time when they have no reason to care?
Replies
The presentation need is exactly the shape of it on my invoicing tool. Nobody cares about a business profile until it is printed at the top of a document going to their client.
So I went one step further than prompting at that moment: the moment does the asking. A visitor can build an invoice without an account, and filling in the seller block of that invoice is filling in most of the profile: name, business, email, address. If they sign up afterwards, those answers ride along and prefill the setup, so nobody types the same thing twice.
The part that bit me was what an empty field means on the way in. If a prefill or a later save treats blank as clear, it quietly erases something the person entered somewhere else. So blanks are dropped before anything is written, and only a real value can overwrite. A missing field costs a prompt later. An erased one is a bug the user finds before you do.
To your question: a required date of birth on the first setup screen, which nothing in the product ever read. It is gone now.