When I canceled my Adobe subscription 2 years ago, there was no way you could do it from your account. I had to contact support, then spent about about 10 minutes with them until they confirmed my subscription will no longer renew automatically. It took that many minutes because on the one hand they are not the quickest to reply, on the other they’re trained to push another year down your throat. You tell them that you haven’t used it in months and they’re like yeah, sure, but did you know you can get 10% off if you renew?<p>It’s like when you’re at McDonald’s and they ask you if you’d like a soft drink for the full menu. Two differences though: I’ve never seen a McDonald’s clerk insisting on the drink after I tell them it’s not necessary. And, most important, at McDonald’s they sell you a $0.99 Coke, while Adobe (and a lot others) sell you $119.88/y subscriptions.
Love how during the presentation suddenly a chat window appeared while I still was paying attention to the presentation, I had to refocus to deal with that one. At first I thought it was part of it but it wasn't. I'm not sure if the person pays attention to their own advice.
I think this is an incredibly well done comic-book style walk through analysis. I know a lot of the comments here are about this presentation not being mobile friendly, but one of the tough pieces here is that it's an analysis of a flow that ranges from email to website with commentary on top... that's honestly tough to do without a structured format.<p>I really appreciated the alternative design directions offered and supporting documentation. It really helps reinforce there are best practices and reasons for these dark patterns to exist, albeit for the wrong (or right? depending on your place in an org) reasons.
Nice job pointing out dark patterns on Adobes site when the presentation itself is using a dark pattern in the form of a box with the text "Hey, we built 29 case studies like this one. They're all free… Interested?" and a giant blue button "Yes please!".. sure you can close it, if you zoom in to find the tiny little grey X on white background in the top right corner.
Considering that the majority of web traffic is mobile, you’d think these experience designers would have built a site that works on smartphones.<p>It told me to rotate my device, but I had to fiddle around to realize it wanted me to swipe horizontally to move to the next screen. And there was no way to scroll down slightly to center the content on my screen, so the bottom was consistently cut off.<p>Good critique of Adobe, but the presentation was surprisingly lacking.
You can surely balance objectively user-championed concerns with business concerns as a UX professional but I felt a lack of understanding of this concept.<p>For instance, clearly stating exactly what will change when you cancel is a total win in my eyes yet you spent 10+ slides tearing that down simply for the use of the phrase "your favorite apps". Not being clear on a multi-subscription website what will change is a more egregious offboarding failure.<p>Verifying you're the account owner and not just a rando who clicked into an email of your friends account when that person expresses intent to make changes to a subscription is a standard security practice not necessarily an intentional point of cancellation friction. Test this bias yourself by trying to <i>upgrade</i> your plan, I'm certain you will be prompted to sign in prior to being able to upgrade.<p>Overall, the presentation was great but the principles underlying it were weak in my opinion.
Adobe CC has a lousy cancellation process for the same reason the US has had lousy foreign policy—it doesn’t need a good one. There is no alternative, and until there is they’re not going to give up the joy of causing pain to those disgusting evil customers who thought of leaving them if they’re not going to be compensated.
Website: “Use your keyboard arrows to view the story!”
Me, using an iPad: “…”<p>Edit: their home page for me is a black void. From their about section: “80,000+ people who care about crafting meaningful experiences for their users.”
As someone recently having gone through that: The cancellation experience is bad, but nothing compared to the experience of then deinstalling Adobe CC. After some fixing I did get my machine to at least boot without throwing error messages, but I still see Adobe stuff hanging around my system. Ugh.
My favorite part of this web design is how sentences are broken up across multiple "slides," so the first half (or third, or fourth) of the sentence disappears when you advance to read the next portion. Very reader-friendly!
Reminds me of AOL which was basically impossible to cancel. I don't subscribe to Netflix anymore but I still have positive feelings about their cancellation process which was super straightforward without any dark patterns.
I'm trying to cancel my SimpliSafe service, but their offboarding-friction is much lower-tech than Adobe's. To cancel, SimpliSafe makes you call their customer support during business hours, and they just don't pick up!<p>It'd be easier if my credit card let me audit and block recurring charges from my end, without ever having to interact with the company I'm giving the boot to.
After having similar experience with The Economist, I have switched all subscriptions I’m not sure I will renew to single-usage cards. Luckily there’s more and more banking providers who support this.
Great presentation. Adobe has lost their way. Their products are great, so it's sad. I imagine the engineers at Adobe are mad at management for their sales and marketing behavior. If I needed a job and they were hiring, I wouldn't even consider working for them. I might work for Serif though.
If it's hard to figure out how to cancel a subscription then just do a chargeback. Since it costs you nothing and is very expensive to the business. Punish them for the dark patterns and spying and bloated nodejs background processes.
I do agree cancelling the subscription was difficult, but this was a horrendous effort at signing up people to their site. A sudden chat window to check if i'm interested. And then last page call to action trying to sign me up for more case studies in big bold buttons. The author doesn't seem to be following their own advice.
Does this pattern ever work in Adobe' favor? Do people get that deep into the process then think "yeah, I <i>do</i> love Adobe CC. I'll not cancel actually" ? Are people who are trying to save 120$/year really so put off by this process that they don't do it?
I had to sign back into my computer on my windows install so that I could run the uninstaller, which seemed very odd. I had a one month subscription to in design so I could make some stationery (which went very well), but having to sign in to uninstall a few months later was a bit rude.
Considering that I am not much interested in Adobe's user offboarding, but still clicked through the whole story and read most of it, this must be quite a good format to get information across.
The absolute worst cancellation process I've experienced except maybe for The New York Times. I will never use Adobe subscription products again after going through it
privacy.com: use it & take back control. Give the subscription monkeys a temp credit card that only allows for one payment.<p>When Payment #2 fails, they'll notice, believe me. You can choose to "really" cancel, or just let them figure it out.
Well presented and right in line with my thinking.<p>These "Are you sure you want to leave? You'll be giving up all this . . .". They come off like the kinds of things you have yelled at you after you break up with someone. And because Adobe is not applying any level of intelligence to the process, what's the likelihood that they show me a feature that frustrated/disappointed me as a "reason to stay"? What are you going to say to me? Break-up arguments: "You'll never find anyone who loves you like me, again!" (I know, that's the idea).<p>And my <i>biggest</i> pet-peeve -- "Here's some discounts, please stay" ("I can change!"). You're now telling me that you've been over-charging me. If I've gotten to your cancellation page[3], I'm <i>gone</i>. In fact, you can demonstrate to me that I'm making a mistake by actually doing the <i>one thing I'm asking you to do</i> and then making it <i>really</i> easy for me to either (a) have nothing to do with you ever again or (b) come back painlessly:<p><i>We're really sorry to see you go.</i> <i>We hope you'll come back, but we get it.</i> Let's not do long good-byes. <i>Here's an archive of everything you might want from our service.</i> We'll delete that if you want, otherwise we'll keep it here for 6 months so you don't need to feel rushed. <i>If you change your mind during that time, you can just login and we'll get your account sorted back out in a couple of steps.</i><p>I'd be so surprised seeing something like that, I might end up undoing my choice[4].<p>A few years ago a museum season-pass cancellation, done via phone, got really close to this. The call <i>started</i> with processing the cancellation and confirming that my credit card would <i>no longer be charged</i>. They made an offer after that point, but it wasn't "would you come back if we knocked $10 off?", rather "We only had the one season-pass option before, and I noticed you use about half of your tickets and only in the summer ... we're offering a summer-only option next year that is less than half what you were paying." Had my kids not become sick of the place with how often we went that year, <i>that</i> would have had me come back.<p>[0] So much so that it's near sport for me -- I make sure to do a Timeshare Presentation (with all of the free gifts) as often as they will keep giving me free gifts to channel Nancy Reagan and Just Say No.<p>[1] Crazy over-simplification, especially since my Dad owned/founded the business he sold for...<p>[2] Whether or not that's a flat lie that both you (the salesperson) and I (the customer) know, as in used care sales, or one where the vast majority of people really <i>do</i> pay the full price but "squeaky wheels" can sort something out.<p>[3] You can have a simple confirmation exercise in case I sneezed on my touch screen.<p>[4] For all the trouble companies go to keep you from leaving, it's frequent that they make it almost as painful to re-onboard if I <i>do</i> pull the trigger.