Every signup and onboarding screen has a clear next action — no dead ends
Why it matters
A dead-end screen — an OAuth error page with no retry, a "check your email" view with no resend link, a terminal success screen with no link into the app — is a silent funnel killer. Users who hit one cannot recover without hunting through browser history or abandoning the session entirely, and the user-experience taxon treats unreachable states as first-order defects. Every dead-end state on a signup or onboarding path directly equates to accounts that were created but never activated, or users who gave up mid-signup.
Severity rationale
Critical because a dead end permanently strands the user mid-funnel and destroys conversions that cannot be recovered.
Remediation
Audit every error, verification, and terminal screen in the signup and onboarding flow and add at least one actionable element to each. In src/app/(auth)/error/page.tsx render a "Try again" and "Create a new account" pair; on the email-verification screen add a "Resend verification email" button; on terminal onboarding screens link to the dashboard.
<div className="text-center space-y-4">
<p>Something went wrong during sign in.</p>
<Button asChild><Link href="/login">Try again</Link></Button>
<Button variant="outline" asChild><Link href="/signup">Create a new account</Link></Button>
</div>
DetectionPro
The detection method for this pattern is part of AuditBuffet Pro.
The full method (what to look for, pass and fail conditions, and how results get reported) ships inside the Onboarding UX Audit. The pattern definition, severity rationale, and remediation remain openly licensed under CC-BY-4.0.
Taxons
History
- 2026-04-18·v1.0.0·Initial import from saas-onboarding·automated