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Delete Button. Yammer take a hint.

omarkassim.com

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Re: Delete Button. Yammer take a hint.

#2
>Why oh why have you guys built and application that I can’t leave easily?

I feel your pain, but isn't it obvious though? Increase the pain of leaving and you increase the likelihood of staying. Annoying, but effective.

Re: Delete Button. Yammer take a hint.

#3
post #2

>Why oh why have you guys built and application that I can’t leave easily? I feel your pain, but isn't it obvious though? Increase the pain of leaving and you increase the likelihood of staying. Annoying, but effective.

By the time someone feels that pain he's already decided to leave and it just pisses him off.

Re: Delete Button. Yammer take a hint.

#4
post #2

>Why oh why have you guys built and application that I can’t leave easily? I feel your pain, but isn't it obvious though? Increase the pain of leaving and you increase the likelihood of staying. Annoying, but effective.

The downside to that strategy is if they improved their service (which is what they should be focusing on in the first place), their old users will never come back out of irritation with their past behavior. And the friends of those users won't sign up either.

Re: Delete Button. Yammer take a hint.

#5
post #3
post #2

>Why oh why have you guys built and application that I can’t leave easily? I feel your pain, but isn't it obvious though? Increase the pain of leaving and you increase the likelihood of staying. Annoying, but effective.

By the time someone feels that pain he's already decided to leave and it just pisses him off.

... but you can still include him in the numbers that you present to advertisers.

Re: Delete Button. Yammer take a hint.

#6
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the time someone feels that pain he's already decided to leave and it just pisses him off.

... but you can still include him in the numbers that you present to advertisers.

Yammer is ad-supported?

Re: Delete Button. Yammer take a hint.

#7
post #2

>Why oh why have you guys built and application that I can’t leave easily? I feel your pain, but isn't it obvious though? Increase the pain of leaving and you increase the likelihood of staying. Annoying, but effective.

I'd imagine there's a more innocent reason: deleting things is HARD in systems designed to scale. There are likely to be denormalisations, multiple redundant copies, separate search indexes, caches... bulk deleting an account actually ends up involving a fairly large amount of code.

Re: Delete Button. Yammer take a hint.

#8
I fail to see why people want to delete their accounts when they decide not to use a service any more. Why not simply stop logging in?

With Yammer it at least makes a little sense because there's possibly sensitive business data on there.

But I built and ran a moderately successful Facebook app and people bugged us about it constantly until we built the feature, but the motivations behind wanting to delete an account just baffled (and continues to baffle) me.

Re: Delete Button. Yammer take a hint.

#9
post #7
post #2

>Why oh why have you guys built and application that I can’t leave easily? I feel your pain, but isn't it obvious though? Increase the pain of leaving and you increase the likelihood of staying. Annoying, but effective.

I'd imagine there's a more innocent reason: deleting things is HARD in systems designed to scale. There are likely to be denormalisations, multiple redundant copies, separate search indexes, caches... bulk deleting an account actually ends up involving a fairly large amount of code.

No its really not. I worked on a system where the average user had hundreds of thousands of objects across dozens of servers.

The delete button sets an account flag saying "this user is deleted." The front end UI honored that and no longer showed the user. A half dozen DELETE tasks were then tossed into a job queue, one for each major subsystem (cache, archival storage, etc). The visual effect of deletion was instant and within 20 minutes everything was gone.

Re: Delete Button. Yammer take a hint.

#10
Features which by definition never generate sales are dead last on my priorities, too. I have to log into the Rails console to completely kill an account, as opposed to refunding or turning off billing.

These features are also frequently a usability cluster flop because users are absolutely impervious to wording like "If you tell us to delete this WE CANNOT GET IT BACK."

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