Helping customers' cancel direct debits
Empowering Australians to escape $1.2k pa worth of unused subscriptions, e.g. gym
Role
Product Designer
Industry
Financial Services
Duration
2 months
We waste $1.2k pa on unused subscriptions. They are hard to cancel
They are notoriously hard to cancel and exploit inertia, complexity and inelegant/dark patterns. Research revealed:
76% Australians have experienced difficulty cancelling an online subscription
40% of Australian have said they have had regular payments they had forgotten about
Today, to cancel they can contact the service providers, e.g. gyms and streaming services. However, if they refuse the ACCC and Legal Centres have paper forms (below) to request a cancellation.
Source: ING Research 2023
We cancel for you
Initially, we offered a service to help cancel the subscription (direct debit). This also helped meet our regulatory requirements.
However, cancellation ≠ guaranteed
We cannot guarantee the supplier will cancel the direct debit. Our service is a simple request.
So we also provide a 3yr block on money leaving the account.
To summarise situation:
Two services
One feature
High cognitive load
Great design challenge
Testing revealed 3/6 users were confused
During Usability Testing, I learnt that 3/6 users found the dual offering confusing. A further 2/6 assumed the request guaranteed results.
Based on testing insights, I made following changes:
Changed terminology - from 'block' to 'pause' to better align with user mental models
Reduced ambiguity - iterated alert copy to set accurate expectations
Progressive disclosure - to separate the two services more clearly
These relatively simple changes allowed me to improve comprehension at minimal cost. My Product Owner loved these changes as it still allowed us to use our low cost templates. The templates were a fun constraint as it limited UI changes.
Respectable outcome: 28% completion
This benchmarks against other direct debit cancellation features where completion rates are 25-30% when manual steps are required, as users often abandon due to complexity.
Single-click cancellations have 40-50% completion rates
Reflecting on the project, my hypotheses for the conversion rate was three-fold:
Discoverability
Value proposition
Comprehension
The project was a great learning opportunity on navigating the tension between compliance constraints and user-centered design while working within technical limitations.
