Onboarding is where a training app earns the right to match you. If the questions feel like a form, people answer them like a form: quickly, vaguely, and with the pace they wish they ran. So the new Mura asks one question per screen, with one verb on the button, and it took two days of throwing things out to get there.
The order
Welcome, then name, birthday, gender, city, sports, comfort, pace and distance, goals, habits, style and time, photos and bio, prompts, match filters, and the finale. Thirteen questions between two bookends.
The order is the order a person would tell a new running partner about themselves. Who you are, where you are, what you do, how fast, what you are after, when you are free. Photos come late, once the app has shown it is interested in more than your face.
The rules
A few rules hold the whole flow together, and we wrote them down so every step follows them.
- One question, one verb. A step has a title, maybe a subtitle, the question, and Continue. Nothing else.
- No alerts, anywhere. If something is wrong, a quiet line appears under the field and Continue stays disabled. We never interrupt someone with a pop-up to tell them their birthday is in the future.
- Optional steps say so, in the subtitle, and never block.
- Back keeps your answers. Every field is saved on the phone as you go, so if you quit halfway you come back to the same step with everything still there.
- Progress is a capsule, not a count. It fills smoothly across all thirteen steps. "Step 4 of 13" makes people do arithmetic about how much is left.
- Haptics on choices, never on keystrokes. A soft tap on Continue, a tick when you pick a pill or a slider snaps, nothing while you type.
The vocabulary is the old one
The sports, the comfort pills, the pace axes, the goal fields and the prompt catalogue are the first app's, entry for entry. That is not laziness. It means a profile from the first Mura carries over to the second without anything getting lost in translation, and a prompt someone answered a year ago keeps its question.
The photo grid, twice
The grid is the one place we wanted the feel people know from dating apps: tap a filled slot for Replace, Make main or Remove, drag to reorder, dashed empty slots with a plus. The easy way to build it got most of the way there, but the moment a photo lifts under your thumb is the whole feel, and the easy way would not let us shape that moment. We wrote our own next. It worked and it was not smooth.
So the grid now uses the phone's own reorder, the one the system apps use, which took a longer road to reach but gives the lift, the swap and the settle exactly as they should feel. When the simpler route catches up, we will take it. Until then, we would rather do it the long way than fake it.
Photos are shrunk on the phone before they go anywhere. Slot one is your main photo, and it is what everyone sees.
The finale is real
The first app ended onboarding with a reveal: here is a partner we picked for you. It was made up. There was no match yet, just a plausible card to make the moment feel like something.
We took it out. The new finale is a checkmark, then a short "analysing" screen that is actually waiting for your profile to be saved. It holds for a few seconds at least, so it does not flash, and it only lets you into the app once the save has gone through. If it fails it tries again, then shows a try-again line. You never enter the app with a profile that is not published, and you are never shown a person who was not really picked for you.
That one change is a good summary of the rebuild. Fewer tricks. More things that are true.
