Adobe: The Psychology of User Offboarding | Hacker News Reader

Adobe: The Psychology of User Offboarding

growth.design

172 pointskaizenb77 comments

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?

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.

Yeah that changed because it's now illegal in many places. In Europe you have to be able to cancel things the same way you subscribed.

I didn't know such laws existed. Do you have any sources?

FWIW I live in the EU.

California has such a law.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....

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.

The reality is that perfect UX rarely converts as well as nagging CTAs like this.

He could have stuck the "Read more Studies like this" CTA at the end of the presentation where it would be non-intrusive.

But people like me are not going to read all the way to the end. This a slideshow, and tapping Right Arrow to reveal each thought bubble is irritatingly slow way to go through the story.

It's a creative one, but it's far too slow to effectively communicate this level of minutiae (e.g. "email subject line is truncated in Gmail's desktop UI").

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.

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.

Dark patterns for me but not for thee

Got the same thing, doesn't even close when navigate slides.

How aggrevating

is it a dark pattern when that's basically the end of the article?

The box I'm referring to happened less than half into the article, the one at the end of the article seems quite fair enough :)

Considering that the majority of web traffic is mobile, you’d think these experience designers would have built a site that works on smartphones.

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.

Good critique of Adobe, but the presentation was surprisingly lacking.

Same. I declined to try to read their presentation because of the UX around it.

I really enjoyed the presentation, for the first dozen slides ... but wow did reading one short sentence at a time get tired after that.

It's not a genuine usability critique of Adobe, it's a design firm trying to maximize attention from PowerPoint addicted managers, because that's where the money is for contracting external design.

So the delivery format is tuned to that audience, desktop format, easy to understand slides with funny characters etc., a surprisingly unusable result for everybody outside the target demographic.

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.

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.

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 upgrade your plan, I'm certain you will be prompted to sign in prior to being able to upgrade.

Overall, the presentation was great but the principles underlying it were weak in my opinion.

I guess his point was that you know, the actual login screen should have happened before you were logged into the account. Then again, asking for re-confirmation after pressing "cancel" is also a common thing.

I greatly respect partially authenticated links when I'm emailed about service issues. The same would apply if I wasn't recently authenticated (using a cookie from more than a day ago).

Provide read-only access then enforce auth only when mandatory for write permission. Ideally verify my hardware 2FA or a security code generator (but not sms).

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.

I get by just fine with FOSS alternatives. Just about the only thing that CC has that I haven't seen a good FOSS alternative for is pdf editing a la acrobat. Functionally I can still get by with a license of Acrobat 9 that's over a decade old.

Do you use these alternatives professionally? What kind of work have you undertaken?

Some more than others, yes.

If Adobe was content to only target the content creator market then they would be putting more effort into distinguishing their product and less effort into trying to frustrate users into submission. It's a numbers game and their biggest markets are not ones that use the software for professional content creation.

Someone put this together a while ago, but its huge list of Adobe alternatives:

https://i.redd.it/v69jbvw559861.jpg

I tend to agree with the statement "There is no alternative", as it relates to a few of their products and certain fields/companies. Adobe makes a lot of stuff[0]

As in, there's going to be a lot of places/work where "Photoshop" and a few others are it. There are FOSS alternatives, and some very good ones at that, but they're not used in the majority of professional contexts.

The problem, though, is that would imply there being no need for such an ugly cancellation process. It would be less costly to make cancellation simple. Skip all of the UX dark-pattern research, A/B testing, metrics/telemetry used to hone that process to reduce cancellation and just give 'em a button.

For commercial/professional users in some contexts, you're almost certainly right -- they're not switching to something else any time soon. But I have to believe this nonsense was put there for reasons beyond those users. I think back to my Dad, who purchased the full Adobe Acrobat suite in the mid 00s (something like $500/pop) because he didn't realize he could fill in Acrobat forms for nothing. I wonder how many users of CC are in my Dad's shoes, in which case these screens -- last-ditch efforts to "sort-of scam" a customer into staying -- make more sense.

[0] Try Adobe Experience Manager one day. No. Don't.

"There is no alternative"

Affinity Photo is a credible alternative to Photoshop for many uses. However, Photo is not 100% feature equivalent to Photoshop which means it won't meet everyone's needs. You can certainly use Affinity Photo for professional results. For examples, see: https://affinityspotlight.com/articles/tag/affinity-photo/

Affinity Photo, Designer and Publisher are all cross-platform (Mac and Windows) and are not based on a cloud subscription model. They are also substantially cheaper than Adobe apps.

The Adobe app that truly has no rival is After Effects (AE). There are alternative apps for creating motion graphics or visual effects, but nothing can match the range of features that AE encompasses.

A related, but important point about Adobe: the dominance and longevity of their apps mean the learning resources are simply unrivalled. There are probably more tutorials for Photoshop than any other piece of software ever. That volume of learning - from beginner to advanced, and to high-specialised use cases - is enormously appealing to all users.

There is no alternative

That hasn't been the case for quite a while. There is plenty of software, typically with much lower cost or even free in some cases, that now provides a credible alternative to Adobe CC applications for many users including professionals who have real work to do.

Figma

Sketch

Affinity

Blender

Photopea

VectorStyler

Vectornator

It's not 2010 any more.

Obviously these alternative products all have their own strengths and weaknesses and features and limitations. So do the CC applications. There are plenty of cases where one or more of the alternatives actually offers better functionality and/or UI these days.

I use these simply to spite Adobe.

Sick of Adobe's greed-driven lack of respect for customers.

Also, after interviewing with Adobe (granted this was 3-4 years ago), I was not impressed. I was asked who I voted for in the 2016 elections.

Website: “Use your keyboard arrows to view the story!” Me, using an iPad: “…”

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.”

“Could this meeting have been an email?” -> “Could this multimedia experience with custom controls have been a blog post?”

I feel the same way about many video tutorials and reviews.

"Could this video tutorial have been 3 written commands?"

When reading, it's at my own pace. I can stop and go without extra steps. I can copy and paste.

If it's a video, now I have to listen at their pace (and I seem to listen slower than I read), hit pause/resume, adjust my volume because somebody on my side is making noise, go back and forth because I didn't catch something, etc.

It's a generally worse experience for me.

The only thing I like about tech tutorial videos is that you see everything they do, including stuff the presenter might not have thought to mention. If you're deep into some unfamiliar territory, this can be very helpful.

Otherwise, I'm with you, but I've had co-workers who loved watching YouTube videos about some language feature or another, or whatever, and did so often. I don't get it, but I guess it worked for them.

The video 'tutorials', especially on Youtube are often an upsell method for paid video courses. Those tend to have a lot more fluff content to pad out the run time.

I get it though. They had a lot more pictures than words to say about those pictures.

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.

Well why would you ever uninstall Adobe CC? You love Adobe CC don't you? You wouldn't give it up would you? You need Adobe CC to live don't you?

Yeah. It isn't fun whith an outgoing firewall, there's always a new service trying to connect to some server, whith such funky names that you kinda have to verify that it's an official server before you greenlight it.

I'm wondering if they (or a third party) gonna make use of Windows 365 cloud PC's with Creative Cloud preinstalled and just sell access to it when needed.

I’m convinced it’s literally impossible to remove it from your machine. I once ran tree on root before and after installing so I would know exactly what to remove when I was done with the project. And I was absolutely determined to remove every trace of it. I probably spent days in total attempting to rid my machine of the malware before giving up. It’s everywhere. And when you remove it their sneaky pings home (even after you’re no longer a customer!) find a way to put it right back on your machine.

The people behind Blender, Figma, etc. are doing a public service as far as I’m concerned. The sooner Adobe dies as a company the better.

I've had this opinion for years: Adobe is the Microsoft of creative software. They're gigantic and ubiquitous, but their software is miserable garbage and they don't care.

I luckily only ever did web design with their software, and Sketch has been a viable tool for me for about 5 years so I am not trapped in their ecosystem.

Their software is pretty great. They're behind on some things because they are a slow behemoth, but by and large their software is polished and feature-heavy and in many cases the industry standard.

Regedit is your friend. Find -> Adobe -> delete -> yes

A “.design” site that 1) forces me to use landscape mode - so it knows I am on mobile, and then 2) shows keyboard hints…

The artist also uses a "dark pattern" where a little popup window covers up the right arrow 2/3rds of the way through saying, "HEY SUBSCRIBE TO MY MAILING LIST" what a hypocrite.

The guy isn't anti-dark pattern, they're pro-user perception. These are all case studies on how best to build a good user perception and what are the best places to put dark pattern in order to not hurt that.

I wish Adobe would listen to me when I write in "I am cancelling because you do not support Linux".

CS6 works out-of-the-box for me in Wine, but I suppose that's not everyone's cup of tea.

No, because you have no guarantee an update won't break your setup. This makes it impossible to keep working on whatever you are working, or even access your work.

Moreover, you might not be able to get help from Adobe if you run into issues.

Because it is an unsupported setup. It works, but you are on your own.

Not that I'm remotely interested in Adobe's products anyway.

CS6 hasn't been updated in 3 years, so there's not much to worry about there.

THIS. A thousand times this.

Adobe has been literally the only thing that keeps me anchored to my Windows PC.

I've seen a lot of talk on the Adobe forums about them not supporting Linux and the responses have been mostly because they think Linux users expect it to be free, and would never pay for it. They also regularly denigrate Linux users as people who like to run lean systems that wouldn't be able to handle the hardware requirements Adobe has for their creative suite products.

It was really shocking to read some of the comments from Adobe employees about Linux users and why they won't ever support Linux.

Those are weird excuses when the best reason not to support Linux is the ludicrous level of fragmentation and all the problems it causes. That's why most applications that don't support Linux refuse to support Linux.

The easy solution is just say you're only going to support one or two distros then. The solution to the problem is easy, but Adobe doesn't want to deal with it so they're effectively passing on a huge revenue opportunity.

> The easy solution is just say you're only going to support one or two distros then.

Yeah, but even within a single distro breaking changes occur with pretty high frequency. They'd have to limit themselves to a specific distro's LTS at best.

Playing the devil's advocate here, but is there really a huge revenue opportunity loss when most users, even those otherwise inclined to use Linux, are willing to use Windows to keep using their product?

Same here. Unfortunately Adobe has no competition for pro use, especially if you use many of their apps (I use regularly over 7). And this force me to use Windows. It's a trap!

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!

A great offboarding experience for sure

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!

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.

Wow. Think I lasted on that page for under 5 seconds before reacting "Yeugh." and closing the tab.

This whole presentation is ironic. Get to the point

The absolute worst cancellation process except maybe for The New York Times. I will never use Adobe subscription products again after going through it

Unless they changed something recently, the last time I cancelled my Adobe CC subscription I just signed into my account on their website and clicked "cancel". That's it.

And one time I accidentally cancelled it because I meant to go back and logically clicked "cancel" (the button should have been labelled "End Subscription" or something less ambiguous). In that case I called Adobe and in two minutes they uncancelled my subscription by starting a new one, so I got like 3 months free.

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 do 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.

Adobe is horrendous for cancelling, this is actually an improvement from what it used to be.

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.

Excellent and useful content. Thanks to the authors for this and their site's other content on psychology of design. Valuable knowledge.

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

I had to block my card because canceling was too complicated.

Until the end, I thought this is a lesson to spot fishing mails. I thought I knew it when some of those screens showed no SSL encryption.

privacy.com: use it & take back control. Give the subscription monkeys a temp credit card that only allows for one payment.

When Payment #2 fails, they'll notice, believe me. You can choose to "really" cancel, or just let them figure it out.

I wish my corporate training were this fun

Well presented and right in line with my thinking.

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).

And my biggest 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 gone. In fact, you can demonstrate to me that I'm making a mistake by actually doing the one thing I'm asking you to do and then making it really easy for me to either (a) have nothing to do with you ever again or (b) come back painlessly:

We're really sorry to see you go. We hope you'll come back, but we get it. Let's not do long good-byes. Here's an archive of everything you might want from our service. We'll delete that if you want, otherwise we'll keep it here for 6 months so you don't need to feel rushed. 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'd be so surprised seeing something like that, I might end up undoing my choice[4].

A few years ago a museum season-pass cancellation, done via phone, got really close to this. The call started with processing the cancellation and confirming that my credit card would no longer be charged. 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, that would have had me come back.

[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.

[1] Crazy over-simplification, especially since my Dad owned/founded the business he sold for...

[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 do pay the full price but "squeaky wheels" can sort something out.

[3] You can have a simple confirmation exercise in case I sneezed on my touch screen.

[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 do pull the trigger.

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