Almost all of us have been there. You sign up for something in seconds, then months later spend what feels like hours trying to cancel it.
You search your inbox to work out where you originally signed up. You click through endless menus, hunt for the elusive cancellation button and, at some point, wonder why you ever signed up in the first place.
This collective frustration has been bubbling away for long enough.
Now, the government is stepping in with measures designed to make subscriptions easier to cancel and ensure customers are told clearly when contracts are going to renew at a higher price.
From January 2027, all organisations will have to make changes to the user journeys around subscriptions.
It is a welcome move, but it is also just one part of a much bigger story about the way digital services are designed.
For years, businesses have become increasingly sophisticated at designing journeys that encourage us to sign up, buy, upgrade and stay.
The problem is that the journey often changes and becomes more complex when we want to do something the business doesn’t want us to do.
Signing up is easy. Cancelling is hard
Signing up is easy. Cancelling is complicated. Buying takes two clicks. Finding out what you have agreed to can take considerably longer. And often cancelling may not even be an option online. Instead, you have to sit in a telephone queue for hours, and are passed from one team member to another.
These experiences aren’t always deliberately deceptive. Sometimes they are simply the result of organisations designing around their own processes rather than the needs of the people using them. But the impact on the customer is negative.
In 70 per cent of cases, people would not return to a retailer after a bad customer service experience.
This is something we explored through Nexer Digital’s Hidden Journey research. We looked at the barriers disabled people face when navigating retail journeys, and found that what appears to be a simple process from the outside can become surprisingly difficult when you encounter barriers along the way.
What struck me was that exclusion is rarely caused by one problem. More often, it is the accumulation of small barriers. A form that isn’t easy to navigate. Information that is difficult to find. A process that assumes everyone will interact with it in exactly the same way.
That has relevance far beyond accessibility and disability.
We need to think much more carefully about the journeys that happen after the transaction.
What happens when someone wants to change their details? When they need support? When they want to make a complaint? When circumstances change and they need to leave? These are often treated as secondary journeys and they shouldn’t be.
A genuinely user-centred service should give people the same control whether they are joining, staying, changing or leaving. If we make the first step effortless but deliberately introduce friction further down the line, we are not really designing for the customer.
The government’s intervention on subscriptions should help to remove some of the most frustrating examples of this behaviour and, importantly, force businesses to think about the experience they are creating. However, it remains to be seen what impact these changes will have.
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Good digital design is about giving people the information, control and independence to achieve the outcome they need, even when that means walking away and cancelling. After all, they may return when their circumstances change once more.
Making subscriptions easier to cancel is a good start. Now we need to look at all the other hidden journeys where unnecessary friction has become normalised. People shouldn’t require determination, detective skills and a free afternoon just to leave a service they no longer want.
- Founded in 2007, Nexer Digital (formerly Sigma) is a human-centred research, design and development agency which creates products and services that enhance people’s lives and work.