This was part of the challenge activities, we had to choose an online flow that we had been through as a user and then chart it out in a user flow. I chose to analyse the process of cancelling your netflix subscription as I had done that recently and always find it interesting how companies handle you leaving them.

I was interesting to pay attention to these actions on a granular level and bring my awareness to how netflix tried to convince you to stay but also actually let you cancel - as a user this is definitely a positive and it means that I leave with a good impression of them. It put me in mind of the work that Harry Brignull does in bringing awareness to dark UX and how users lives are sometimes intentionally made difficult so that they do in fact stay tied to a company, there is indeed a type called “Hard to cancel” which is exactly this experience of it being easy to sign up but difficult to then break away from a commitment to a company (Brignull et al. 2023). In this case it felt like a positive experience but when reading around online a lot of youtube commenters were angry because they wanted to delete their account completely, not just cancel their subscription. I thought the copy of the cancellation process made this very clear but it is always interesting to see where other users have had painpoints and from their comments it does sound like permanently deleting your account is much more complicated.

References

BRIGNULL, Harry, LEISER, Mark, SANTOS, Cristiana and DOSHI, Kosha. 2023. ‘Hard to Cancel’. Deceptive Patterns [online]. Available at: https://www.deceptive.design/types/hard-to-cancel [accessed 9th February 2024]