Designing a Retention-Focused Offboarding Experience
Overview
With many users leaving after the Akamai partnership ended, the company lacked visibility into churn reasons. I redesigned the offboarding experience into a structured flow that captures feedback and offers alternatives. Users could retain settings, keep cloud storage, or downgrade instead of fully canceling.
Challenge
The challenge required turning offboarding into a retention and insight-gathering moment. Challenges included:
No churn data
Users canceling due to yearly events
Lost settings/data made returning harder
No retention options available
Objective & Goal
To reduce churn, provide alternative retention paths, and gain insights into why users unsubscribe.
Process
I restructured offboarding into a clear three-step UX: showing impact, collecting targeted feedback, and offering personalized retention options. By integrating warnings, feedback categories, and storage/retention plans, the process became a strategic moment to reduce churn, educate users, and improve recoverability. The process included
Step 1: Impact awareness
Step 2: Feedback (structured categories + notes)
Step 3: Retention options
Settings retention
Cloud storage plan
Custom retention pricing
Clear confirmation + success modals
Result
Redesigned the onboarding experience for a global CDN SaaS platform to improve user activation and retention. By simplifying the flow, refining plan categorization, and integrating customer segmentation, the redesign achieved 84% more direct purchases, 33% fewer inactive users, and a 78% boost in monthly revenue — proving the power of data-driven UX design in SaaS environments.
Learnings
Emotional design, choice architecture, and transparency were critical in framing offboarding as a thoughtful, user-centered process instead of a dead end. By giving users alternatives and explaining consequences clearly, the flow successfully reduced avoidable churn.
Additional Learnings:
Offboarding must include empathy and clarity.
Structured feedback is essential for refining product strategy.
Logical alternatives prevent unnecessary cancellations.
Tools That Shaped This Project
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