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.
Adobe: The Psychology of User Offboarding
21–30 of 80 posts
Re: Adobe: The Psychology of User Offboarding
#22As 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?
Re: Adobe: The Psychology of User Offboarding
#23When 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 y…
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.
Re: Adobe: The Psychology of User Offboarding
#24A “.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.
Re: Adobe: The Psychology of User Offboarding
#25Adobe 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.
Re: Adobe: The Psychology of User Offboarding
#26When 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 y…
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.
Re: Adobe: The Psychology of User Offboarding
#27As 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.
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.
Re: Adobe: The Psychology of User Offboarding
#28Considering 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.
Re: Adobe: The Psychology of User Offboarding
#29Well 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.
Re: Adobe: The Psychology of User Offboarding
#30As 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.
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.