UX: What happens when the user wants out?
February 4, 2020
As people obsessed with great UX, we tend to discuss the importance of the entire user journey. As we design experiences, we highlight the importance of the onboarding, how crucial engagement is, and when to offer delightful details. But have you ever considered the experience you provide users when they want out?
Wanting out made complicated
A couple of months ago, I caved in and signed up for a digital Wall Street Journal account. Signing up was, as you'd probably expect, painless. Click-click, done. The first three months were just a mere dollar which, of course, required me to enter my credit card information.
Well, time passes and I realize I hardly ever read it. I did read a couple of articles here and there, but not enough to the justify the $36.99 per month that my subscription now cost. I remembered the smooth and frictionless onboarding and headed over to my account to look for ways to cancel it. Nothing. Nowhere. After digging, I finally saw 'Manage subscriptions'. Surely this is where I could cancel my subscription. Nope. Dead end. I could see my subscription and when it would renew (ironically the one thing I did know).
I tried searching for 'Cancel account' and got one hit: Cancellation and refund policy. This didn't really seem like the right place, but guess it's the closest thing I can get. The first lines I'm met with is:
"In order to change or cancel your subscription, please contact Customer Service. We do not accept cancellations by mail or email or by any other means other than calling Customer Service."
Honestly, this would be where most users would just give up.
It seems very user hostile to allow me to subscribe digitally, but cancellation required a call to Customer Service. I'm redirected to a page with toll free numbers for every country and finally find the one for Sweden. I called the number and was greeted with a voice saying that this number is no longer in use or it's been disconnected.
Clearly, they really don't want people to cancel.
I decided to call the UK number - obviously not toll free - and I was finally patched through to someone who could help me cancel my account. It probably took her 4 or 5 attempts before she got my email address typed in correctly (spelling lepetitgarcon.com over the phone is not the best experience). Once she found my account, she broke into some dark design patterns trying to convince me to not just cancel, but to instead add more features at the same monthly cost. I declined. After 10 minutes on the phone, and surely an hour since I started this endeavor, my account was finally closed. Let me tell you this much, I'm going to think long and hard before I ever sign up for a digital service from the WSJ again.
Wanting out made simple
Since I started working out a couple of months ago, I'd been playing with the idea of getting an Apple Watch. I had the original Series-0 Apple Watch, but hadn't used one since. In a way, I think it's fair to say that I'd never used an Apple Watch that is fair to evaluate. So two weeks ago, I headed over to the Apple Store to pickup a space grey aluminum Apple Watch. I was just planning on primarily using it for workouts, so I got the base model with a sport loop. The guy in the store was super helpful and, since I have smaller hands, offered great advice on which case size to get even though it's less expensive.
I soon learned the Apple Watch just isn't for me. I don't particularly like having all that data available as it tends to stress me out more than actually give me insights. The app that my glucose meter uses only worked with one of the complications for the watch faces so that didn't give me much value. This was one of the primary reasons for me getting one - to easily see my blood sugar while working out. So last week I went back to the Apple Store to return it. I've done this with Apple products before - bought something, tried it out for a few weeks, and returned it. The experience is always the same. They let me return it, no questions asked. They smile. They validate me when I say that it just wasn't for me and I leave feeling good about the experience.
I was telling my ex-wife about this experience later that evening. I said to her that it's almost as if I get even better service when returning something than buying it! "Of course, because that's the experience you will remember," she said, "and it'll lower your barrier for buying something there again".
Why are these experiences are so rare in the digital space? Even when it's easy to delete an account, it always leaves you feeling like you're breaking up with someone (or something!). And then after 3-6 months and they start emailing you asking to come back. What if we instead focus on delivering a service that's so good you'll never want to leave, but if you do, you'd actually want to come back. End things on good terms. Remain friends.
You need to confirm your email to confirm your subscription.
-
March, 2024
-
February, 2024
-
January, 2024
-
December, 2023
-
November, 2023
-
October, 2023
-
September, 2023
-
August, 2023
-
July, 2023
-
June, 2023
-
May, 2023
-
April, 2023
-
March, 2023
-
January, 2023
-
December, 2022
-
November, 2022
-
September, 2022
-
August, 2022
-
July, 2022
-
June, 2022
-
May, 2022
-
April, 2022
-
January, 2022
-
December, 2021
-
November, 2021
-
October, 2021
-
September, 2021
-
August, 2021
-
July, 2021
-
June, 2021
-
May, 2021
-
April, 2021
-
March, 2021
-
January, 2021
-
November, 2020
-
October, 2020
-
September, 2020
-
August, 2020
-
June, 2020
-
May, 2020
-
April, 2020
-
March, 2020
- Regarding Zoom
- Why wireframes are becoming obsolete
- Get static
- Emotions and work - know yourself
- All books are now free
- Wireframes are too concrete
- Stuck at home
- What Great Managers Do
- From Error to Understanding: The Importance of Brand Voice When Things Go Wrong
- Answering your question - How I design
- The Sliding Scale of Giving a Fuck
- Hard startups
-
February, 2020
-
January, 2020
- Debbie Millman - Time Well Spent
- The last tracker was just removed from Basecamp.com
- Fathom Analytics
- Redesign to learn
- How putting a price on speed helped one retailer increase mobile revenue in just 2 months
- Accessibility drives aesthetics
- Smart people use simple words to make others feel smart.
- The great paradox of our time: everything is both better and worse than ever before
-
December, 2019
-
November, 2019
-
October, 2019
-
September, 2019
-
August, 2019
- How we work with microcopy
- Measuring UX with HEART
- Mobile E-Commerce UX: Deemphasize ‘Install App’ Ads or Avoid Them Entirely
- Analytics are reshaping fashion’s old-school instincts
- What to Do When You Feel Uninspired at Work
- Stay in your lane and outlast your competition
- A Mindful Approach to Technology
- “I Just Knew I Was Going to Surpass These Guys I Was Working For”
- People Are Starting to Realize How Voice Assistants Actually Work
- Fast Software, the Best Software
- Data-Driven Design Is Killing Our Instincts
- Freelance and Business And Stuff
- UX can’t be defined by one set of "rules"
-
July, 2019
- 5 Years - 300+ Posts!
- Superhuman and email privacy
- Why Consultants Quit Their Jobs to Go Independent
- Give them candy: small details make all the difference
- Your inbox is spying on you
- On Modus: It’s Time for a Code of Ethics for Designers
- Frank Chimero on causing ’good trouble’ and re-imagining the status quo to combat achievement culture
- Advertising: contextual vs. behavioral and why it matters
-
June, 2019
- Citrix improves UX and cuts costs by 65%
- Delight Comes Last
- Tim Cook’s Stanford Commencement Address
- You care more about your privacy than you think
- The Cost of Lies
- Let’s assemble like the Avengers and... do work
- Big Mood Machine
- Simplicity is a war
- How Notion Is Going After Atlassian and Why It Just Might Win
- Hiring a Management Consultancy for Digital Is a Mistake
- Just write: why Product Designers should write, and how to get started
- Dos and dont’s on designing for accessibility
- I’ve redesigned my website and it looks exactly the same
-
May, 2019
-
April, 2019
- Scapegoating User Experience Design
- Clip sharing with Overcast
- Why don’t we just use Material Design?
- Accenture sued $32m+ over website redesign for Hertz
- Venture capital money kills more businesses than it helps
- Creating a UX Strategy
- The elegance of nothing
- Amazon Workers Are Listening to What You Tell Alexa
- Working as a UX-lead
- Gumroadday: Get my books at -17% discount
-
March, 2019
- Working as a UX designer
- Meet Q: The First Genderless Voice
- It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work
- How Notion pulled itself back from the brink of failure
- What’s the meaning of work?
- Wireframes are becoming less relevant — and that’s a good thing
- Neurodiversity and the Digital Divide: how our neurological differences shape the way we experience the web
- Accessibility, a powerful design tool
-
February, 2019
-
January, 2019
-
December, 2018
-
November, 2018
-
October, 2018
-
September, 2018
-
August, 2018
- Living among baby robots
- Yuval Noah Harari on what the year 2050 has in store for humankind
- Voice Input’s Effect on Social Norms
- How I kicked my email compulsion
- Facebook's struggle to moderate itself
- The Secret to Ant Efficiency Is Idleness
- Google Employees Are Organizing To Protest the Company’s Secret Search Engine
- Why Small Teams Win
- Back to Work!
- The Bullshit Web
- Nikhil Sonnad on the banal evil of Facebook
-
July, 2018
- Five questions UX employers should be asking
- Just keep at it
- Yes, Alan, There Is An ROI For UX Design
- High Fives, AI, and Connecting the Dots: MailChimp’s VP of Design on What Business can Learn from Design
- Rands Information Practises
- The Race to a Trillion
- What Elon Musk Should Learn From the Thailand Cave Rescue
- Cheap Shower Curtains
- Tech Sector Values are Broken?
-
June, 2018
- Confirmation Bias in Design
- Rise of the machines: has technology evolved beyond our control?
- Good product writing is conversational
- Retail is Not Dying, But it Has to Evolve
- The Netflix Binge Factory
- We are all trapped in the “Feed”
- Stop “feeding” your users
- Turn off your push notifications. All of them.
- From the Drawing Board to the Board Room
- Think inclusively at every step
- No classes, no professors: the alternative to business school
- Designer Ethics & The Moral Implications of our Apps
- Conversion optimization with A/B tests
-
May, 2018
- AI Ethics - A New Skill for UX-Designers
- Netlify now shows your deploy status on its favicon
- Let them eat cake
- Netflix Culture
- Skype
- How do you learn UX?
- The New Google Assistant
- What Happened to Apple’s Whimsy?
- Who would you trust more with your data, Apple or the government?
- Unfoundered
- Microcontent: A Few Small Words Have a Mega Impact on Business
- Twitter logged all user’s passwords in plain text
- Requests for Personal Data From Apple, Google, and Facebook Compared
- What’s in a pattern name
- GDPR is ruining my life
-
April, 2018
- A Modest Guide to Productivity
- Google Debuts a Standalone To-Do App, Google Tasks
- Apple Should Make an Instagram Clone
- Vanity Metrics
- Tech is not Neutral
- Facebook to exclude North American users from some privacy enhancements
- Netflix has to "produce great content, market it well, serve it up beautifully."
- Sen. Blumenthal: “Your business model is to maximize profit over privacy.”
- Productivity
- My #1 Piece of Advice to Freelancers: Lean Into The Moment
- Design Systems: Better UX through Defined Standards
- Tim Cook - We care about the user experience
- Europe’s tough new data-protection law
- The Real Technology Problem
- Why Small Teams Win
- Whose risk?
- Phone Bored
- Karim Rashid
- Creative Class is open
- Dieter Rams
- Being cash-free puts us at risk of attack: Swedes turn against cashlessness
- What’s a ‘User Experience’ Anyways?
-
March, 2018
- Fake News is spam
- Bleeding Out
- How Tech Giants Design For Transgender Users–Or Don’t
- Don't use the F word (freelancer)
- Dropbox
- Conversational Design
- Everyone Is Going Through Something
- It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work
- Flight Crews Don’t Decide Where To Fly
- New Tools Don’t Always Equal Productivity
- The seat at the table
- Why Can Everyone Spot Fake News But YouTube, Facebook And Google?
- Cuba
- Bye bye Facebook
- Why I hate your fake redesign
- Givenchy
- Diversity in the design industry
- Your competitors don’t matter
- Apple’s "Sound on the Go" Strategy
- The Most Important Design Skill For An AI-Dominated World
- Love letters to trees
- Amazon has a fix for Alexa’s creepy laughs
- You have to make sure that you’re focused on the thing that matters.
- Voice Input is the Next Big Thing - Or is It?
-
February, 2018
- Specialize
- Pricing Philisophy
- AMP for email is a terrible idea
- Is this Finnish school the perfect design?
- The #1 reason Facebook won’t ever change
- A Year of Learning and Leading UX at Google
- C.A.R.E - A simple framework for user onboarding
- Inside Facebook´s Hellish Two Years
- A better user experience...or?
- Personas
- Reflections on working on an iPad
- Everything Easy is Hard Again
- How to succeed at freelancing
- The iPhone X is Apple’s underrated masterpiece
- Make me think
-
January, 2018
-
December, 2017
-
November, 2017
-
October, 2017
-
September, 2017
-
August, 2017
-
July, 2017
-
June, 2017
- The Why before the Why
- No Share Buttons on Mobile Sites
- Groundwork for Creating Great User Experiences
- ARKit
- 4 Reasons Why Your Body Text Should be Bigger
- Now that Apple is talking about AR and VR, should we be too?
- Think like an artist to create better designs
- Investing in businesses and products
- 10 Reasons Why All Designers Should Start Writing More
- Become a better UX-designer with these three words
- Vox Media Accessibility Guidelines
- Writing for UX: some practical tips
-
May, 2017
-
April, 2017
-
March, 2017
-
February, 2017
-
January, 2017
-
December, 2016
-
November, 2016
-
October, 2016
-
September, 2016
-
August, 2016
-
July, 2016
-
June, 2016
-
May, 2016
-
April, 2016
-
March, 2016
-
February, 2016
-
January, 2016
-
December, 2015
-
November, 2015
-
October, 2015
-
September, 2015
-
August, 2015
-
July, 2015
-
June, 2015
-
May, 2015
-
April, 2015
-
November, 2014
-
April, 2013