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Comment by JoelMarsh | Hacker News Reader

Author here.

I agree. After a few minutes of after-thought I have updated the article to reflect this feedback.

Thanks, everyone. I appreciate the input.

> Also, it should NEVER be difficult to cancel. Just time consuming. And to be super clear "time consuming" to me is about 5 minutes.

As a user, I hate you for that.

I agree with this sentiment.

Here's some UX for you - the user owes you nothing.

Sure have an optional form or field for cancellations but 5 minutes? How is this beneficial for anyone?

So, it's a free product - they will just never cancel their account and you will have inactive users sitting there. Who is this good for?

So it's a paid product - they will cancel their account and tell everyone about the ridiculously long winded process they had to go through to cancel it.

... or they'll just dispute the recurring credit card charges for your paid product, and you'll get your merchant account frozen after a few "cancellations".

We can argue over whether or not the original suggestion constitutes fraud, but the credit card companies will definitely treat it as fraud.

Indeed. I cancelled Netflix 3 times, and look who's back paying for their content!? Me!

Not the main reason, but because it's easy to cancel it, I don't worry about signing back (counter-example: gym subscription).

I stated this above, but because I have a policy of pain-free cancellations, I get about 50% of my cancelled users back WITHOUT HAVING TO DO ANYTHING.

The post you had here before you edited was completely nonsensical.

A UX post, on how a site should prevent users from cancelling to benefit the website, at the expense of the user.

That is the opposite of a good UX.

Here is some 'User pseudo-psychology' for you... Having your blog titles take up more than half the vertical space of my browser (when it is full screen) stops me reading your writing.

I'm glad I checked the comments to see if this was worth my time... question answered.

ha yea i read the first few sections & they were so hollow i had to come check the comments too -- good UX is not putting a bunch of filler in your opening 10 paragraphs. Only thing thats been said so far is that "3-click rule" that my 900 year-old boss spews to management after raving to me about how much he loves the Mac philosophy.

In all seriousness, would love to see a guide from the more scientifcally-researched vein of this type of work.

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