Wouldn’t it be tight if we allowed our users to opt out?
Even before I saw last week’s episode of Parks and Recreation, it had been a week of ranting about how we make businesses better by allowing users to opt out. (I’d specifically taken Guitar Center to task for their insane “unsubscribe” trap.) But then Wednesday night on Hulu (because who has cable tv anymore?), I watched the Parks and Recreation episode “GryzzlBox” in which our hero government bureaucrats (who wouldn’t let anyone opt out of healthcare or taxes or anything) get their grrr up when they learn tech giant Gryzzl has been data-mining everyone’s communications in order to pitch products to them. This leads Ben Wyatt to a confrontation with the Gryzzl CEO in the Perdples Court. Ben declares:
A person should not have to have an advanced law degree to avoid being taken advantage of by a multibillion dollar company. You should be upfront about what you’re doing and allow people the ability to opt out.
Ben’s correct. Complex agreements are intentionally complex in order to hide bad actions. In good.simple.open, I argue that “complexity equals deception.” But if complexity and stealth provisions are good for anything it is proving their opposite. You want to do good work and create a good product? Embrace simplicity and allow your users to opt out.
The best proof of freedom is not demonstrated by what you can do but by what you can choose not to do. There is a quote attributed to Dave Winer that goes: “The easier you make it for people to go, the more likely they are to stay.”
We want to know we have options. We don’t like feeling trapped. Openness means making it easy for your users to opt out. When it isn’t easy to opt out, we’re more likely to go to extremes.
Here’s what I mean.
I used to use a certain service to list my music (I’m a songwriter and performer) on iTunes and other music stores for a yearly fee. When a song of mine wasn’t performing well, I decided not to renew the yearly deal. But the service didn’t have a simple, open way to cancel a renewal. After poking around their website and reading their support material, I found nothing and had to email support. They responded with a link to a non-public page where I could request to “Cancel Renewal” or “Take Down” my songs. The form was strange and complicated. I expected an option for “Do not renew” but had several fields to complete.
They could have made it easy to cancel renewal for one song. They could have had a simple status field next to each of my releases in the dashboard with this:
SONG TITLE: RENEW / LET EXPIRE / ASK
That’s how the web hosting company I use (Dreamhost) handles domains. It’s easy for me to review what I want to keep and what I want to let go. The “Ask” option is great too. Maybe I don’t know whether or not I want to spend $10 on this domain (or song) right now, so just ask me when it’s close to the renewal date.
The result of dealing with this complex and closed system was that instead of canceling the renewal for one song, I canceled it for every release I had. Because they’d made it so difficult to opt out, I went extreme and opted out of everything while I had the chance.
You don’t want your users to do this. You want to show them you’re doing good work so they will remain engaged. A great way to prove this is to show users the exit. It’s a way of saying, we won’t pressure you because we know you can leave at any time. So turn those exit signs on. Let users see the way out. It will inspire loyalty.
good.simple.open is a book about doing better work by focusing on simplicity and openness. It is only $5 on Kindle, or $10 in paperback.
