Consider Offboarding: Letting Users Leave In Peace

Mar 31, 2016

Let’s start with a story: a tragic experience made a little worse by careless design.

The Story

I go to a small liberal arts school in Oberlin, Ohio. A student here recently passed away and her passing affected a lot of students, in various ways. I know at least one student, a friend, who tried to deactivate their Facebook account, understandably, to avoid the flood of memorial posts from other friends, as it was already a tough experience to lose a friend, community leader, and activist — being reminded of the tragedy virtually all the time was too much, and they needed a break.

This is fine, this is a natural effect of public grieving in a digital platform, and if this situation arises a user should be allowed space to leave the platform for a time, mourn in their own way if that’s what they need. The trouble is, when this person tried to deactivate their Facebook to take a break they were presented with an analog of the following screen (screenshot taken from my trial attempt to deactivate my account):

Let’s just look at the top part of the screen you’re presented with:

A screenshot of the top of the form a user is presented with when one attempts to deactivate their Facebook.

1. First, right at the top, you have a header that explicitly works against the user’s intentions. Make no mistake, this is manipulative design. This header copy probably isn’t here to help a confused user because it takes some work on the user’s part to figure out how to get to this page in the first place. The exact steps to get to this page are:

• Go to your Account Settings, nested away in the navigation bar (or at the bottom of the “More” section in the mobile apps).
• Select the “Security” category, which I think most information architects would agree, isn’t the most sensible place for this to be. Finally, there’s a setting at the bottom of the security options that presents you with the option to: “Deactivate your account”.
• Press “Edit”, which I find a confusing way of phrasing it, and you’re finally presented with the screen above. So, yeah, I’m not buying that there’s any reason this header exists other than to completely conflict with a user’s explicit, very serious intentions.

2. Second, Facebook musters the entire weight of one’s social network: “Your 1,119 friends will no longer be able to keep in touch with you.” This is pulling at a user’s heartstrings, and could be devastating for a user who, for example, is trying to take a break from the service because of a very real, debilitating addiction. Specific to this situation: if someone is leaving because of a death, a line like this has the power to remind a user that their social network has recently been cut down by one. These aren’t just numbers that represent connections to be marketed, they’re real, actual people, and it’s uncomfortable at best, tragic at worst, for a company to use friends as emotional fodder.

3. Finally, Facebook takes the friends-as-manipulation thing a step further: displaying 5 friends’ profile photos, 5 photos, 168 pixels wide (I checked), in a last ditch effort to guilt you into staying on the platform. To top it off, above each photo is written: “<friend’s name> will miss you.” This isn’t just manipulative anymore, it’s actually putting words into users’ mouths, because there’s no way to know if these 5 (random) users will actually miss the user in question, the person just trying to get some rest from a platform that can overburden, over-notify, and overshare. On top of manipulating an experience, Facebook actively undermines the trust users put in it to allow people to represent themselves.

This Is A Usability Issue

In user experience design we talk a lot about onboarding, but I don’t think we take the concept of offboarding experiences very seriously, especially not for social systems like Facebook. I say this because if any consideration had been given more care would be apparent in the design of this offboarding experience. Addiction, grievance, burn out, exhaustion and disgust are all emotions/states users feel in relation to social media, they need to be allowed to express and decompress these emotions with or without digital products, in a way that isn’t condescending, and most definitely in a way that isn’t actively manipulative of their trust and emotions.

There’s a lot to be learned and a relationship to be maintained from Facebook’s side as well. Understanding why users need a break and learning how to facilitate that could improve user retention rather than frustrating users, and potentially ending up losing a user who feels manipulated, when all they wanted to do was take a break. We need to have conversations around managing and off boarding user’s data, temporary offboarding protocols, and making sure this experience is as non-combative as possible.

Doing Better

In my friend’s particular case this manipulative design wasn’t just offsetting, it actively frustrated the process of trying to grieve peacefully. There are certainly lessons to be learned about user experience, user burn out, and a bunch of other important data and meta data that could be generated and processed if we paid more attention to offboarding as a part of the user lifetime. I plan on writing more about these benefits in the near future, but this particular piece is more to highlight a list of concerns that came out of this experience:

• We can do better. Design for real people, not for users who exist in a vacuum and need to be roped in, notified, and convinced to stay, even if they’re unhappy with the experience.
• We need a way to report these errors. We talk a lot about user studies, usability audits, etc. — we have frameworks, thought experiments, and research methods built around understanding users, but there’s a problem in relying almost exclusively on gathered usability information: you can miss out on real users’ problems. It should be as easy to report a bad usability experience like this as it is to file a bug report or complain about a damaged package.

I picked on Facebook here because I’ve had a friend experience a horrendous usability issue, but looking forward I think there’s value in developing the concept of offboarding users, whether that be for temporary trauma/stress/burn out or because they really do need to just leave the platform. Obviously there’s no way to understand and quantify the users who simply never log in again, but for those users who are willing to go through an offboarding process, we shouldn’t manipulate their emotions, certainly, but I want to set the bar higher: let’s make leaving an experience as humane as signing up.

— Andres Cuervo

Originally published at cwervo.com.