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Adobe: The Psychology of User Offboarding

growth.design

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Re: Adobe: The Psychology of User Offboarding

#51

Post by Silhouette »

Bendy wrote: post #8

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.

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.

Re: Adobe: The Psychology of User Offboarding

#53

Post by handrous »

doubled112 wrote: post #37
MandieD wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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 did…

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.

Re: Adobe: The Psychology of User Offboarding

#55

Post by the_snooze »

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.

Re: Adobe: The Psychology of User Offboarding

#56

Post by Rumudiez »

dusted wrote: post #48

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

Re: Adobe: The Psychology of User Offboarding

#58

Post by frosted-flakes »

dimmke wrote: post #33
pahn wrote: post #11

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.

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.

Re: Adobe: The Psychology of User Offboarding

#59

Post by at-fates-hands »

swalsh wrote: post #54

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

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.

Re: Adobe: The Psychology of User Offboarding

#60

Post by at-fates-hands »

willis936 wrote: post #25
Bendy wrote: post #8

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.

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

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

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