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!
Adobe: The Psychology of User Offboarding
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Re: Adobe: The Psychology of User Offboarding
#32My 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
Re: Adobe: The Psychology of User Offboarding
#33As 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'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.
Re: Adobe: The Psychology of User Offboarding
#34Adobe 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 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.
Re: Adobe: The Psychology of User Offboarding
#35Wow. Think I lasted on that page for under 5 seconds before reacting "Yeugh." and closing the tab.
Re: Adobe: The Psychology of User Offboarding
#36Until 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.
Re: Adobe: The Psychology of User Offboarding
#37Website: “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.
Re: Adobe: The Psychology of User Offboarding
#38Adobe 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?
Re: Adobe: The Psychology of User Offboarding
#39Considering 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 Ado…
I really enjoyed the presentation, for the first dozen slides ... but wow did reading one short sentence at a time get tired after that.
Re: Adobe: The Psychology of User Offboarding
#40Considering 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 Ado…
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.