When did you last un-signup?

As someone whose both job and natural curiosity with technologies compels me to sign up and experiment with new Internet based services, I've started thinking about this recently.
Why do service providers on the whole not provide an easily accessible method of 'leaving' a service?

Maybe they hope the 'We haven't seen you for a while' type emails I receive periodically will have an anti-churn effect which brings me rushing back, but more often than not they just remind me how many services in which I not longer have any interest , still have my contact details. Of course the digital identity thinkers would have this solved by me revoking the service's licence to my details I guess. But that’s not quite the same thing as a definite notification of intention to leave the service.

Of course one answer is that ‘number of signups’ is a staple, if often misleading, success metric so there is an obvious disincentive to provide any exit button, especially for start-ups trying to justify their existence and funding demands.

I was talking about this to my colleague recently and we both tend toward the same practice or merely stopping visiting a site and assuming that our account will atrophy over time! But do they, and is this enough?
If the service just sits there then all is cool, but I've has some annoyances lately. A social network tool I has a look at has been mailing everyone in my address book regularly with invites to join (Incidentally - sorry is this effected you!!!!!!!!!). Yeah it's my fault for importing my Gmail contact list into the thing, but I was testing the features. I've tried many times to kill the mail outs. I have no ongoing interest in the services......

..... I just want to pull the plug.

Come on service providers - give us the ability to un-signup!

All this of course raises another question about a user's data and any meta-data that they have imported into the system of generated by its use. In reality I would maybe not just wish to leave the service but also to take my data with me!

Comments

The Art of the state

A few weeks back I was working with the dev team at WGC on some interface design for our product prototype. We came across a point at which we have to give the user the ability to indicate their desire to save a current state. As we discussed the various ways in which we could visually indicate a 'save' action button, I realized that as a whole the industry has settled on the image of a 'floppy disc' such as this: Now in this day and age the floppy disk is an anachronism - have any of the myspace generation even ever seen one? It is certainly a few years since the average family PC came with a floppy drive as standard equipment and an online life requires little in the way of tangible media. - and yet the iconography persists. The more I thought about this however, the more I came to think that if we needed to provide a user action which is exemplified by an outmoded concept, then maybe we should rethink our interface and indeed application architecture at a deeper lev...

Silicon Valley and Everywhere else

It has been an interesting month with a lot of exciting work with a lot of smart people taking up my time. I've had my head down and been doing some serious graft and hadn't really noticed the minor details like the fact that I'd bounced between three continents , changed my time zone 8 times and taken eating out with all meals accompanied by technical debate and napkin sketching to be the normal way to consume sustenance. Then last week I had a reality check when I suddenly realized I was in fact doing for a living something I dreamed of as a kid. So, what prompted this moment of clarity? Well, I looked up and found myself hurtling down the 101 between Burlingame and Palo Alto in Silicon Valley in the back of a rented mini-van, MacBook balanced on my knee , hacking some last bits of code together for a product demo I was about to deliver at Stanford University ! Now I may have been doing the relatively easy job from the technical point of view of getting the Rails co...

bmedia Presentation materials and links

Thanks to everyone for being such an engaging audience last night - it was a pleasure to talk to you all. If any one has any questions or wants to argue against anything I said feel free to email me or post a comment here. You won't offend me by disagreeing with anything I said, I welcome debate and am not too proud to surrender to a well reasoned argument - debate helps us all understand better. As always with these things there are points I realize I should have made and other things I realize I should have expanded upon but time is always such a limited commodity. If any one can make it to the next Leeds open coffee we can talk further. Thanks for some really interesting questions and conversations after the presentation. As promised, the presentation (as a PDF) can be download from here : Also, below is the reading list I recommend and also the list of Web 2.0 apps that are worth taking a look at to see if they can help you in your business. If you find any others you like, pl...

Techiedog-blog

Search This Blog