Canceling A Membership Should Not Be A Long And Winding Road
If money is on the line, I don’t want to take the scenic route.
Photo by Tobias Aeppli via Pexels
Recently, I had a frustrating experience when attempting to cancel a membership for a video editing service. The scenario started off on a sour note — I haven’t opened the product in 9 months, and I don’t remember signing up for a paid account. I must have needed the product for a project and forgotten about it.
The process of canceling this membership, which was not even in use, was far less than ideal. From my perspective, the UX felt unnecessarily friction-filled.
My intention is not to slam the product in question. This post is meant to be educational; I’ll unpack the UX issues and pose recommendations. Ultimately, I expect a straightforward user experience when my money is on the line.
Email did not include helpful links
Issue: I received an email stating that my membership would automatically renew in four weeks. This message was clear and easy to understand, but there were no links to help me manage my membership.
Impact: I had to open the product website in a separate tab. I struggled to find the billing page.
Recommendation: In the email, include a “Manage Membership” button or link that opens to the billing section of the website.
2. Billing page was difficult to find
Issue: I had three failed attempts at locating the billing page on the website. (I tried the left sidebar, dropdown with my name, and Upgrade link, shown in the image below).
Impact: I could not find the billing page and had to resort to the Help center.
Recommendation: Billing should be prominently placed. Potentially, there could be multiple ways to access billing as it’s a core function for paying customers.
3. Resorted to Help Center to locate billing page
Issue: I scrolled to the bottom of the home page and found a small “Help” link in the bottom right corner. This brought me to the Help Center, where I found an article about billing that included a link to the billing page.
Impact: It felt frustrating to go through the Help Center for a task as simple and common as canceling a membership.
Recommendation: As noted in the previous bullet, billing should be prominently placed, so that it’s discoverable on the home page. Additionally, the “Help” link could be in a larger typeface with a darker color that better contrasts against the white.
4. Turning off auto-renew required multiple steps
Issue: During the cancelation process, I had to complete two steps to ensure that my membership would not automatically renew.
Impact: I thought selecting “Turn off auto-renew” would turn off auto-renew. It was surprising to see an additional step. If I had not been paying attention, I would have missed the second step, which is a mandatory survey. Surveys are often optional, so I’m accustomed to ignoring them.
Recommendation: Ideally, this should be a one step process (select the button and done!). If the business relies on the survey data, there should be a progress indicator to show that multiple steps are involved for turning off auto-renew.
Final Thoughts
Overall, it took too much time and energy to cancel my membership. I use technology every day and consider myself to be fairly tech savvy. If I struggled with this process, it’s likely that other users have too. The stakes are heightened because inability to complete this process would result in financial loss.
Path I took to cancel my membership:
Read email
Open Vimeo website in a new tab
Try and fail to find Billing from home page (x3)
Locate Help link
Open Help Center page
View article on Billing
Jump to Billing page
Begin cancellation process
Deselect auto-renew
Deselect auto-renew again on another page
View profile to confirm membership cancelation
To better support users, my final recommendation is for this process to be condensed to four simple steps:
Recommended path:
Read email
Open Billing page (via link in the email)
Cancel membership
Receive confirmation that membership is canceled