Charges From Beyond

Originally published on UX Collective in 2020.

I opened my email this morning to a credit card charge of $24.99. This specific charge was for an application I signed up for about 90 days ago, which, to my memory, I thought I canceled before the cutoff date. Digging deeper into my account I saw an additional charge for $24.99 last month as well.

As I sat at my office desk I thought, “why do I, a consumer in 2020, have to manage every subscription that slips between the couch cushions?” I’m not as upset with the money spent as I am about the fact that there was no stop-loss put in place to help me as an end-user who hadn’t been active on the product for two months at this point. So I figured the best way to move forward was to address it head on by asking a very simple question:

How do we evolve our subscription economy to be more user-friendly?

Writers before me have explained the complex nature of subscription economies in current-day software development. However, this article aims to take an action-forward approach in providing a stop-gap that can help us move one step closer towards more friendly products.

The problem starts with UX

From a business perspective, subscription models can be quite voracious when left unchecked. Though what I’m looking to solve is more narrow in scope. Software programs across the globe are repeat-charging users for products they aren’t actively using. It’s practically hardwired into every non use-based payment workflow on the internet. I think we can do better.

But companies send you payment confirmation emails!

Sure. But it usually goes to spam, just like the other 100 emails I (and many of you) probably get every day. Why are we relying on users to check their trash bins for receipts? Shouldn’t we be thinking ahead? Isn’t that what good design does? To get my point across, let’s look at a few examples of problematic modals and what we can do to improve them.

The free trial

The godfather of sneakiness. This tactic offers a free trial in return for your credit card information (to be charged at a later date). Most of us see right through this and know that the second our details are typed into those payment fields, it’s a countdown timer until we forget about it. But hey, it’s convenient! The next thing you know you have repeat charges of $24.

The full-year charge

The $1 trial is a clever marketing tactic. You land on the product page, like what you see, and get excited to start using it because it’s affordable to try. But something’s off. You look at the fine print and see an automatic yearly charge of $499. Huh?

The one positive here is that they offer a 10-day refund policy. But again, design should be thinking ahead of the curve to avoid the confusion a customer faces when they’re hit with a $499 charge.

The cancellation policy

It's common place nowadays but only because pressure from consumers made it popular. Subscriptions were harder to cancel in the past. You had to call customer support and maneuver through dial menus until some reluctant care specialist let you cancel your subscription. Hopefully by this point you can see the change we collectively need to make in order to have repeat-charging be a thing of the past.

A possible solution

Something like the image above is the right approach. It gets the point across that inactivity will result in an automatic hold on any future payments. That means you won’t be charged month after month if you forgot to comb through your monthly statement. No more late night phone calls to fight against charges, scraping through your email’s junk bin, or finding the password to that one site you registered for a trial which you probably lost by now.

This idea isn’t radical

When it comes to changes in subscriptions, trials, and other related payment models, we’ve seen this reinvented time and time again. What people thought was once impossible was quickly disproved when enough companies started following suit. Marc Emmer highlights this phenomena nicely by stating:

There is no quicker way to differentiate a brand than to disrupt the pricing model within an industry.

Remember Dollar Shave Club?

The team at Dollar Shave Club realized people were paying too much for razors. But even further, they figured it was annoying to have to head to the store so frequently for something you use every day. So, they devised an impossible-to-deny subscription model that would make it simple for people to sign on. In a lot of ways it spawned the new era of delivery subscriptions. You can’t go a day without seeing a ridiculously cheap subscription for a product mailed directly to your doorstep.

Or let’s look at the freemium alternative. Spotify defied the music industry when it started offering free (legal) music to anyone willing to hear a few commercials every hour.

This model isn’t explicitly novel, but no one had tapped into such an ubiquitous experience like listening to music all day. Plus, they made it look cool while they were at it. The point is, it’s never too early to shift an industry.

Counter-apps come first

When an industry faces friction of some sort, you often find counter-apps working to solve those issues. Maybe you’ve heard of UnrollMe. You essentially give them access to read your emails (not totally comfortable with this myself) and then it unsubscribes you from any subscriptions you currently have active. It’s a great idea in principle. But why are they doing it? Why aren’t companies providing this solution themselves?

We as product designers should understand that our users are digital natives. In fact, nearly 35% of users have three or more active subscriptions. At this stage in the game there’s so much competition in the SaaS space that mistakes like upsetting your customer can lead to increased churn rates. It can make your company come off as icky.

The majority of product designers are given access to their users’ behavior patterns. Why not just take the next step and implement standards that prevent repeat-charging? It’s an instant win for your customers and you can make it a feature on your product or landing pages that stands out.

Pushing Forward

I think it’s easy to blame customers for their forgetfulness, or to suggest they should be better at deciphering the fine print. But let’s be real. That’s the same as asking a user to manage all of their private data online, or to know which sites are targeting their shopping behavior. It’s completely unrealistic.

At some point you have to stop and think: how can we as a society work together to make our lives better? The answer is in executing that change where we have a say in it: with product development.

I don’t expect a radical change to take place in SaaS subscription models, or product designers to have final say on payment models. In fact, I’ve worked alongside companies that go against exactly what I’m saying, and that’s okay, for now. But with such a laser focus to improve UX across the design community, why are subscription models so dated?

The next time you’re designing a payment workflow for your project, a client, or giving help to a friend, suggest they implement an automatic cancellation after a set period of inactivity. Test the results. You can even survey those customers down the road and ask if that made them see your company as more trustworthy. I know I would appreciate it, and I’m sure your customers would too.