Amazon Prime Membership & Deliberate Design

‍You’ve heard about one-click buy buttons, now read about six-clicks-&-a-google-search trial cancellations.

‍

Personally, I wouldn’t consider Amazon to be one of the most aesthetically pleasing websites on the Internet. It certainly is functional, but awesome to look at? Nope. The UX & UI design, however, is absolutely killer.

‍

For those of you who don’t know, UX stands for ‘user experience’ and UI means ‘user interraction’, i.e. how to make the user experience a certain thing, behave or interract with something in a certain way, using design and structuring. It is a vital part of the web design process and pretty much any process of creating a product.

‍

Jumping back to Amazon - every now and then, I’m offered a free trial of Amazon Prime. I take it, order a bunch of stuff and enjoy the free quick delivery, then diligently cancel my free trial so as to not get billed at the end of the month. It is a wonderful system. Especially considering Amazon keeps offering me free trials, and I keep canceling them before I get billed. Has anyone else here done that? And have you also had to experience the mind-boggling confusion that canceling Amazon Prime is as well?

‍

This is an instance where Amazon uses all of the tricks up its sleeves to prevent you from canceling your membership without outright doing anything illegal.

‍

First of all, it’s very difficult to find where on Earth you even cancel your membership. There’s no easily accessible button, nothing

 about cancellation catches your eye - you have to search for it. I eventually googled it, and was directed to the appropriate link. From there you are led to a small page, and you instinctively hover over the big blue button before you realize it actually says ‘See more about your prime benefits.’ NOT ‘CANCEL’. 

‍

Which button is your eye instinctively drawn to?

‍

Below the button you have three columns - an image, some text and a plain yellow button in each column. You skim it and finally find the cancel membership button on the bottom right. From there it takes you to another page asking you to confirm your cancellation. The button is far easier to find this time - being the only button in yellow, but Amazon still gives you plenty of mouth-watering information on why you should keep Amazon Prime right beside it. Only a truly determined person would actually follow through with canceling their trial. And even if a large number of people do that, the free trial is still a win for Amazon because a large percentage of people will just stay.

‍

‍

Your membership is canceled and from there you are taken to yet another page detailing all of Prime’s benefits, offering you help and opportunities to pick up your membership again.

‍

‍

Amazon gives its consumers plenty of opportunities and incentives to just stay there:

‍

• You can’t easily find the cancel button, so you decide to just stay on Prime. I mean, it’s pretty convenient, and it’s pretty cheap right?
• You find the cancel page, but click on the ‘See more about your benefits’ button by mistake. You decide it does sound pretty good actually and leave it as it is.
• You scroll past that button but start reading the text that precedes the actual cancellation button. It sounds pretty good. You leave it as it is.
• You get to the button, and it takes you to the confirmation page. Looking at all the information again there, it looks pretty good and you leave it as it is.

‍

Just like how the one-click buy button gets more customers to buy more, this drawn-out process gets less people to cancel less.

‍

Design and proper planning has a huge impact on your website. It is important to consider what your website does, and how to carefully build a path for your viewers to go straight to this goal. Well, without going to quite the extent of bad-taste Amazon frequently goes to, of course. It’s all about the balance.

‍