“I want you to treat me like I’m dead,” said Amanda Costello, “you wouldn’t do this to someone who wasn’t alive.” Amanda was at the office of her national bank, trying to close her account so she could move to a credit union. As she described, the bank was making every effort to keep her, or at the very least, make money off of her.

During my interview with Amanda (one of many people I interviewed to learn about offboarding experiences), she said that when she asked the bank to cancel a yearly automatic withdrawal, the bank associate said they would reopen her account and continue to charge her the money, plus hundreds more in overdraft fees from the time her account was closed. The bank admitted that they would keep Amanda’s personal information on file even after she stopped doing business with them.

It took Amanda multiple calls over the next month, as well as letters stating she did not authorize the bank to do such a thing. She’s now sure that they won’t reopen her account, although she said that she never got confirmation that the bank had deleted her information.

This is an example of bad “offboarding” — the process a user or customer must go through in order to part ways with a company or service. Most of us have probably experienced this at some point, asking ourselves, “why on earth is it so hard to just cancel or opt out?” And it’s certainly not unique to banks. These practices abound online.

Let’s look now at why bad offboarding is bad for business, and why it’s so often designed to be an insensitive process. We will look at the psychology of why humans need closure, and how that can apply to designing a good offboarding experience.

What is Offboarding?

According to Tim Wright’s podcast over at Fresh Tilled Soil, there are many situations in which a customer needs to offboard; for instance, perhaps the service isn’t giving the customer anything useful anymore. The customer could also be dissatisfied with a product, or simply not have a need for it anymore.

Business leaders might agree with these reasons, but they often think that it’s not in their best interests to let customers unsubscribe so easily. It’s a critical lapse in judgment; bad offboarding can impact a customer’s view of the entire experience, and can hurt a product’s reputation. This can break down trust between users and products in a way that’s nearly impossible to build back up.

It may seem obvious to many of us, but it should be stated plainly: bad offboarding experiences can and will leave a sour taste in anyone’s mouth, and those soured people are more likely to share their opinions about your product with other potential customers. As Wright elaborates further, the more barriers they face, the more frustrated they grow. And that’s when a company’s reputation is on the line.

Some offboarding is so purposefully bad, it goes so far as to incorporate dark patterns. Dark patterns are defined as a series of design patterns that takes advantage of the user, at the benefit of the company. This involves visually confusing design or copywriting in order to guide or “trick” the user into doing something they didn’t intend.

Sound familiar? Many products use these methods to trick consumers into staying with their service longer.

It’s pretty easy to design a website or process that forces users into a specific task flow, and so it’s a tempting strategy for stakeholders in order to get the metrics they want. But it doesn’t take long for consumers to catch on to what’s happening, especially if it involves their money, and that loss of trust is incredibly hard (often impossible) to rebuild.

G2A Shield is a great example of a service that uses many tactics — guilt tripping, unnecessary work, and dark design patterns — to keep its customers (see the first screen in the process below). The unsubscribe link is greyed out at the bottom, and the text in the green button “Leave G2A Shield active” is just a roundabout way of saying “keep my account.”

It doesn’t stop with G2A Shield, either. Deleting an account from a website or web service often takes time and effort. For instance, Facebook forces a user to deactivate his or her page for three weeks before permanently deleting all data.

And to add to the evidence, to pardon a personal anecdote—just a few weeks ago, I had to cancel my Microsoft Office 365 subscription that I didn’t want or need anyway, and it took me three attempts, a password reset, and then Googling the problem to figure out how to go into my iPhone to toggle it off. It was a mere $6.99 a month.

Make Offboarding More Humane

Offboarding can be a challenge, especially when business stakeholders don’t want to touch the topic, but there are steps that designers can take to make sure their solutions keep the user in mind.