Clarifying Where
User Trust Broke
Role
UX Designer
Skills
User Research, Journey Mapping,
Prototyping, Strategic Thinking
Duration
3 Month Contract
Team
Product, Marketing, Engineering
Company
Context.ai — AI-powered SaaS startup (~15 employees)
Prototypes:
SUMMARY
Context.ai users were cancelling after payment without explanation. I discovered they weren't leaving because of missing features—they were abandoning the product after losing work with no way to recover it. By the time they reached cancellation, trust was already broken. I redesigned the cancellation flow to surface user intent earlier and created a recovery framework to help users maintain trust even when the product failed.
PROBLEM
Why Do Users Keep Cancelling Their Subscription?
PROCESS
Research
Users tolerated friction until they lost work, then they left.
10 user interviews revealed users stayed silent until failure forced them to leave. Only after something broke — lost work, unreliable output, or confusion with no recovery — did they articulate frustration. Power users described problems nearly identical to those raised by churned users, suggesting churn was not an isolated edge case but a late-stage signal.
Affinity Map for Churned Users
Affinty Map for Power Users
Hypothesis
If Users Are Given Transparent Choices At Cancellation And Meaningful Recovery Options When Things Go Wrong, They Are More Likely To Trust The Product
Method
Redesigning The Cancellation Flow
Myself, the Director of Marketing and the Head of Engineering put or heads together to implement a clearer cancellation experience that surfaced user intent and offered alternatives (pause, discounts). This would give the team even more visibility into why users were leaving and reduce churn.
BUT! Churn Did Not Significantly Decrease.
The cancellation flow solidified the real problem: users weren't leaving due to UX friction—they were leaving because product failures destroyed trust. No amount of flow optimization would fix unreliable core functionality.
SOLUTION
Reliability, Not UX Polish
I designed high-fidelity recovery concepts to make the solution tangible for stakeholders and show what preventing trust breakdown would require.
This wasn't a UX-only fix. It required significant engineering investment in core reliability.
I presented these findings and concepts in a deck, ultimately recommending we focus on enterprise customers who could tolerate early-stage friction rather than stretching resources across B2C. Otherwise, B2C users would be continuously unhappy.
IMPACT
Focus On B2B and let B2C go, For Now
Reliability — not UX polish — was the dominant driver of churn.
As a result, Context.ai chose to focus resources on enterprise customers rather than continuing to stretch across B2C and B2B.
Startup companies that let go of B2C and focus exclusively on B2B often see customer acquisition costs drop by roughly 30–50% while improving customer‑lifetime‑value (LTV) ratios from below 1:1 to 3:1 or higher.
At the same time, former B2C users are no longer exposed to the financial strain, inconsistent access, or churn experience that the unprofitable B2C side created. Goodbye frustrations.
Most importantly, my work helped the team make an informed strategic decision grounded in user reality rather than assumption.
Before
B2C & B2B
After
B2B
