Dark patterns or standardized carelessness - the Adobe's fall from grace case

Early last week, news broke that creative giant Adobe was hit with a complaint from US Federal Trade Commission for “deceiving consumers” by trapping them into annual subscriptions with hidden termination fees and overall complex cancellation flow.?Federal complaint is seen as a precursor to class action lawsuit which could make an expensive example out of Adobe.

This news came amid growing concern within the Adobe user community over updated General Terms of Use in February. The updated Terms suggested that all content created within the Adobe's Creative Cloud application realm could potentially be used and ‘abused’ by the company. This interpretation spread like wildfire over TikTok prompting calls for immediate cancellations and migrations to competing products. Viral backlash resulted in Adobe having to come forward with official explanations and swift revision to their Terms of use.

In the revised and more "user friendly" Terms it was clarified what the granted “non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license” in the Your Content Licensing clause really stands for - basically giving over the rights for the scope of technical operations needed in cloud service workflows as well as for third party content analytics that would inform Adobe’s services development.

While this seemed too much fuss over nothing, it didn't go unnoticed that Adobe also quietly removed preselected consent for opting in to their AI training models. These types of provisions already proved to be a dark pattern users are not too happy discovering, as seen with Slack and Meta, so Adobe went ahead and also reworked what the source for their model training should be, reverting from all proprietary work 'syphoned' through consent to only work that is intentionally shared on Adobe Stock Marketplace. At least one crisis was averted. For now.

Adobe’s shift in 2013. from perpetual licensing to a subscription-only model is considered a pivotal moment in the industry that solidified the SaaS approach in software sales.

Despite initial commotion, transition to SaaS proved to be a lucrative decision bringing in a record revenue of 2.8 billlion USD in 2019. alone. Things took the turn for the worse for Adobe ever since the infamous merger with Figma fell through in 2023. and the company once again started raising prices to their toolbox, mainly for Acrobat Pro with pricing going up over 30-40%, depending on the user type and region.

Dissatisfaction surfaced on Adobe's community pages and in outer regions like Reddit, with users discussing increased fees and bad customer service while sharing recommendations for more affordable alternatives.

Even if you are considered an "industry standard" and you can buy out your competition, if your core customers are dissatisfied with both the product and the service, it's one of the signals a bigger wave might hit soon.

Around that time, mid January '24. I registered with Adobe for the Acrobat Pro trial because as a product freelancer-solopreneur I wanted to explore digital signature options and PDF document management. The trial was offered for 7 days, after which an automatic charge would be triggered for what appeared to be a monthly subscription.?

If we look at the subscription plans from the image above, the monthly fee is prominent and reference to annual subscription is there but in smaller print and without explicit connection to the monthly charge (by using asterisk or a connecting reference).

Trials with locked-in annual commitments on a monthly plan (APM) are still relatively new to consumers outside of B2B contexts, potentially leading to misunderstandings when landing pages don't display clear wording and visible discounts for such plans.

This setup could easily confuse inexperienced users thinking they are either selecting Free trial with a subsequent monthly charge OR choosing a Buy now option with an annual subscription.

The Trial Welcome Email continues this uncertainty.

Welcome emails in SaaS have one of the highest open rates (at 60%), but their CTR (loose read-through indicator) is around 14%, while the average across industries is below 3%. Given the Adobe subscription can be activated on top of existing freemium within tools of Creative Cloud (i.e.while user is already logged in the app) this is not like typical (B2B) SaaS onboarding that requires specific activation by CTA confirmation.

Consequently, it's easy to assume Adobe had it low on open rates and CTR and users were not aware of their impending annual 'membership'.

For users who do open the email, the assumption remains they are in a 7-day trial, but the email's cancellation window reference does not add up, lacking, again, explicit guidance or a link to the fine print.

The particularly odd move was dividing the email template proportionally into two almost equal halves, 'main' body and small print footer that falls outside of user's viewport unless they intentionally scroll and examine it. This is where the critical information about terms of cancellation and early termination fees (ETFs) can be found.

When was the last time you examined a lengthy footer? Or any footer for that matter.

These made-to-be-overlooked patterns are what prompted civil complaints to FTC leading to investigation and eventually Department of Justice filing a formal complaint against the company and its two executives, president of Digital products and VP of Adobe.

"During enrollment, Adobe hides material terms of its APM plan in fine print and behind optional textboxes and hyperlinks, providing disclosures that are designed to go unnoticed and that most consumers never see. Adobe then deters cancellations by employing an onerous and complicated cancellation process. As part of this convoluted process, Adobe ambushes subscribers with the previously obscured ETF when they attempt to cancel. Through these practices, Adobe has violated federal laws designed to protect consumers." (Source: Federal court complaint by DOJ)

Second angle of the FTC complaint concerns the cancellation flow which I had ambiguous feelings about.

Before my trial ended I knew I would cancel the subscription because my use case wasn't fitting. On day 5 or 6 I logged back into the Adobe account and selected an option to cancel my trial.

I was immediately logged out.

It felt unusual, but I figured, since I was still within trial window frame, this was their brutal goodbye flow. To my surprise a day or two later I accidentally noticed a charge on my credit card and realized my subscription had been activated! No warning or invoice. I logged back in to see my trial/subscription was never cancelled and nervously clicked through UI maze to find a 4-step cancellation flow, which, as much as I was furious, I rather liked.

Because I was still within 14 days of refund frame, I was able to seamlessly pull through and receive my refund without any hassle. Still, I remain puzzled about what happened when I initially cancelled my trial.

Since then, Adobe has changed the way they represent their trial and subscription options but they are sticking to some old tricks such as annual monthly preselect and their ETFs.

With their rebranded Adobe Express playing catch up with Canva, the company stepped towards more modern PLG efforts with prominent visual communication in their onboarding flow, outlining trial milestones and expected charges more explicitly (i.e. in full simple sentences).

Adobe meanwhile announced their intention to challenge the complaint before it turns into class action lawsuit costing company not only damages in reputation but also potentially hefty payouts. The trial itself could set the precedent to how companies communicate and guide users through their monetization funnels.

The lesson here is: losing trust is expensive.

Trust is something I often underline to my stakeholders while we're coming up with various flows or UI copy and it's frequently a poorly understood concept: people develop relationships with their products. It may be very transactional, but it's still a partnership and there are certain expectations formed on both sides.

Users expect transparency and delivery on promises, while companies expect fair use and reasonable engagement (that leads to monetization). Once trust, a foundation of any good partnership, starts chipping away, no amount of product marketing will make up for it, especially in the B2B world where a lot of customer acquisition is based on word of mouth / direct recommendations.