SiriusXM Online Cancellation

The Problem

SiriusXM offers subscription-based radio services. Currently, the company is not letting customers cancel online. Subscribers have to cancel plans via phone calls.

In November 2018, the digital experience team got an assignment to create an online cancelation flow to potentially offer an alternative way for customers to cancel their subscriptions. This posed as a challenge, since this flow was completely new to the SiriusXM website at the time.

My Role

As an intern on the Digital Experience team, I assisted a Senior UX designer throughout all steps of the design process. So far, we have got through user research, brainstorming, wireframing, and user testing. My responsibilities have been extensively focused on conducting competitive analyses and creating wireframes.

The Process

Research

To kickstart the project, we obtained data about SiriusXM listeners and their experience with our cancelation process from our analytic teams. Thanks to this data, we were able to learn about our users and their pain points during the cancelation process.

To get more insight into the online cancelation process, the team decided to start with a competitive analysis. I was tasked with comparing and contrasting the online cancelation flows of subscription-based services similar to that of SiriusXM. To do this, I explored the flows offered by services such as Netflix, Spotify, Hulu, Pandora, and Amazon Prime.

The competitive analysis shed light on a lot of notable aspects present within a seemingly simple flow. From my research, I was able to deduce a few conclusions about the common themes as well as differences present across the different flows. A lot of services try to divert customers’ attention away from the cancelation option, instead introducing alternative actions such as switching plans, temporarily putting the subscription on hold, or staying to benefit from a downgrade offer. Meanwhile, some flows are more lengthy and complicated than others. These details show that there’s a certain balance that needs to be achieved in this type of flow. From a corporate perspective, a service generally wants to retain its customers. However, from a design perspective, the process also should not be too painstaking or lengthy for users. This made me realize that our goal was to achieve a balance somewhere between these two extremes.

Brainstorming & Idea Development

Taking our learning from the research step, the team moved onto idea development, starting with brainstorming sessions. During these sessions, we incorporated data we already knew about our customers with examples we picked up from the researched cancel flows to devise our own cancelation process. The ideas got iterated a few times before two main concepts were chosen: a “plan switching” flow and a “reason picking” flow.

Wireframing

In the "plan switching" flow, the process starts with a “Switch your plan” option, which takes users to a page where the primary action is to switch to an alternative plan. This flow aims to discreetly divert the user’s attention from cancelation to a change of service.

In the "reason picking" flow, upon clicking on the option to cancel subscription, users are asked about their reasons to cancel, and presented with checkboxes laying out possible causes. Users have the option to pick one from the checkboxes, and subsequently presented with an alternative action or solution respective to the chosen reason.

During both flows, eligible customers would be shown a downgrade offer when they are a step away from confirming cancelation. After cancelation is completed, the accounting landing page would have a pushdown banner notifying customers with their canceled subscription, end date of benefits, and a reminder that they can reactivate their service at anytime.

Prototyping & Usability Testing

After discussions and iterations on the wireframes, the team decided to run a competitive usability test on the two cancellation flows to gain better insights into how potential users would react to them.

We recruited test participants and created test sessions using usertesting.com. We made sure the test participants closely aligned with the demographics of our listeners and were familiar with subscription-based services.

Prior to creating the test, the team tasked me with researching and synthesizing best practices for competitive usability testing with particular consideration to the two cancellation flows. After discussing the findings and more exploration, we decided to have the test participants go through both flows within one test session, following the same curated tasks while thinking outloud. The order of the flows are randomized throughout the sessions so as not to flaw the results with potential biases.

The recorded test sessions then got analyzed based on pre-determined comparable benchmarks of the two test flows. This way, common themes and touch points within both flows get compared objectively and efficiently.

Next Steps

Toward the end of my internship at SiriusXM, the team was in the process of analyzing the results from our usability testing sessions. Afterwards, we planned to use the research feedback to inform high-fidelity designs and implementation.