Offboarding
When developing an app or service, a lot of time and thought is put into the onboarding experience.
What's the optimal flow? How do we introduce people to all the great features we built? How do we make sure they don't skip past the important parts?
First impressions and all that. It's a never-ending process.
I wish the same were true for offboarding. For making it as easy and painless as possible for someone to move out of a platform.
My ideal offboarding experience is as easy and frictionless as possible. It's about offering the best possible service right up until the end.
Deleting an account should be easy. The button should be in a prominent position, and properly marked. Prompting for feedback or offering a subscription discount is fine, but don't put too many steps between me and the exit. If I'm there, it means I made up my mind to leave your service.
All my data should be exportable. If I haven't exported my data, the service should suggest it as part of the offboarding flow.
Introducing complexity here is a signal that the user doesn't matter. Sure, retention is important, but it won't be achieved by adding bureaucracy or friction to the offboarding process.
If anything, making it as easy as possible for users to get out builds trust: that the data and time they're putting into a service is to their benefit. That they're not becoming hostages to the service by using it. It signal that ones behind the service care as much about the people using it as they do about the ones who want to leave.
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