Ashley Sheil
First author of the study that documented how news websites are joined easily and left with difficulty.
Who they are
Sheil and colleagues presented the work at the 2024 CHI conference, characterising the subscription and cancellation flows of popular news websites across four countries and reading them against recent regulatory changes.
Key papers
Sheil, A., Acar, G., Schraffenberger, H., Gellert, R., & Malone, D. (2024). Staying at the roach motel: cross-country analysis of manipulative subscription and cancellation flows. CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
Key ideas
The pattern the paper is named for, the roach motel, is the deliberate gap between how easy a service is to join and how hard it is to leave.
Cancellation flows were found with intentional barriers, among them requiring a person to telephone a representative or to type out a set phrase before the subscription would end.
Subscription flows were also found that do not adequately tell a person that a recurring charge is starting. The study characterises what exists on these sites and does not attempt to measure how much money the practice moves.
Concepts on this site
Sources
- doi:10.1145/3613904.3642881