A brand-new account sees a different Home from an established one, on purpose, and it goes away on its own.
The welcome window
New accounts get a modified Home for the first twenty-four hours, or the first three visits, whichever lasts longer.
Two conditions rather than one, because both failure modes are real. Somebody who signs up and explores for an hour would lose the help too quickly on visits alone. Somebody who signs up and disappears for a fortnight would lose it before their second look on time alone.
Visits are counted once per browser session, so refreshing does not burn through it.
What is different during it
The assistant greets rather than analysing. Covered properly in the piece on the daily insight, and the short version is that an insight engine pointed at four records produces confident nonsense, and publishing that on somebody's first morning teaches them the number is noise.
Starter tasks appear in the Company rail. Normally that rail is leaderboard and participation. On day one both are empty and neither means anything, so the work waiting takes their place.
The feed defaults to Company, where the seeded welcome post lives, so the screen reads alive rather than blank.
After the window closes, the normal surfaces take over permanently. Nothing is lost, and there is no way to bring it back, which is correct: it is scaffolding.
The tour
A guided walkthrough narrates the parts of Home in place, pointing at the real screen with your real data rather than showing screenshots.
It covers the setup card, the rings, the feed and the task rail. It can be dismissed and it does not return uninvited.
Worth taking once. Three minutes, and it is the difference between knowing the rings exist and knowing what they measure.
The setup card
While your organisation is still being configured, a card in the brief shows how far through the foundations you are, with a route into the setup surface.
Three things about it.
It reads live completion, from the same engine as the setup screen itself. There is one source of truth, so it cannot disagree with what setup says.
It covers the foundations only, meaning the things needed to get the platform genuinely working rather than every optional refinement.
It disappears when they are done. No dismissal needed, and it does not come back.
The application is never gated. Everything works before setup is complete. The card is a nudge, not a wall, and that is a deliberate decision: a platform that locks you out until you have configured it is one you evaluate for a week and then abandon.
Where an organisation is on a trial, the card also carries how long is left.
Why the window closes at all
A permanent beginner mode would be easier to build and worse to use.
The scaffolding is genuinely helpful on day one and genuinely in the way by week three. Starter tasks in the Company rail crowd out the leaderboard. A greeting where an insight should be is a wasted slot once there is data to read.
So it expires, on its own, and there is no setting to bring it back. The judgement is that anybody past their first three visits is better served by the real screen, and the evidence for that is that nobody has ever asked for a product's onboarding to return.
A reasonable first week
Day one, take the tour and clock in. Two things, five minutes.
Day two, connect a calendar. Home gets substantially more useful once it knows what your day contains, and so does everything else.
Day three, post something in the feed. The company stream is the surface most dependent on somebody going first, and in a new organisation that somebody is whoever reads this.
During the first week, work through the setup card. Not because anything is blocked, but because the parts of the product that feel thin on day one are almost always the parts waiting on configuration.
By the end of the week, look at the rings once. They will be mostly empty and that is fine. Knowing what they measure now means the shape means something in a month.
What the tour actually points at
Four things, in place, on your own screen.
The setup card, so you know the platform is not finished configuring itself and that nothing is blocked while it is.
The rings, which are the least self-explanatory thing on the page and the most likely to be misread as a score.
The feed, including that half of it writes itself.
The task rail, and that completing something there credits the rings.
Those four are chosen because they are the parts a new user would otherwise either ignore or misunderstand. Everything else on Home explains itself.
If you joined an established organisation
Most of this piece is about new workspaces. Joining an existing one is a different experience and mostly a better one.
The feed already has history. Scroll it. Twenty minutes of the last month's events is the fastest available orientation to what a company actually does, and considerably more honest than an onboarding deck.
The setup card will not appear, because the foundations are already done.
The insight will be real from your first morning, since the organisation has data even though you do not.
Your rings start empty and that is the one thing in common. They measure you, and you have just arrived.
What new users get wrong
Reading the rings on day two and concluding the product is judging them. There is no history yet. They are empty because nothing has happened.
Ignoring the setup card because nothing is blocked. Correct in the short term and expensive in the long one. Most "this feature seems useless" reports in the first fortnight are configuration that has not happened.
Expecting Home to be the whole product. It is the front door. The Cockpit, Plan, the calendar and the search box are where the day is actually spent, and Home is ninety seconds at the start of it.
Assuming the empty feed means nobody is using the system. The feed fills from real events. An organisation still in setup has not done anything yet for it to report, and that changes within days of going live.
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