

Delete Button. Yammer take a hint. - omarkassim
http://omarkassim.com/post/3654554718/delete-button-yammer-take-a-hint

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patio11
Features which by definition never generate sales are dead last on my
priorities, too. I have to log into the Rails console to completely kill an
account, as opposed to refunding or turning off billing.

These features are also frequently a usability cluster flop because users are
absolutely impervious to wording like "If you tell us to delete this WE CANNOT
GET IT BACK."

~~~
prateekdayal
I agree with you patio but if you are serving to a geeky audience, the ability
to leave and export your data can actually help some people decide in favor of
your app when evaluating choices.

~~~
patio11
I know a lot of people _think_ and _profess_ that that matters to their
decisionmaking criteria. I also know a lot of geeks think and profess that
button color has no impact on whether they'd sign up for something.

There is compelling data with regards to the on-the-ground truth of one of
these propositions.

------
omarkassim
Just wanted to add this in:

Scott Balentine (CSM), Mar-03 10:29 am (PST): Hey Omar,

At Yammer, our relationship is with our users. All data, whether from a free
or paid network, cannot be deleted by Yammer. This would violate our Terms of
Service. You as an Admin of a paid account can delete any data on the network.
Like you said before, the data is owned by you. Since this data was not
deleted before I downgraded you, I will re-upgrade you for however long you
need to delete the data in your network at no charge to you. As a paid
network, no individual users will have to delete anything at all.

You can delete messages using the "Delete" link under the "More" menu at the
bottom of each post.

Let me know if you need anything else.

Scott

\-- Delete each message manually. Please.

~~~
halostatue
This attitude is a strong negative, at that. Yammer networks take at least
some control of a company's "membership" and image out of the company's hands.

Someone at my company created a Yammer network two years ago and is no longer
with the company. We cannot remove her (or anyone else who left) unless we
become a paying company.

As soon as I saw that, I stopped using Yammer and will never use them again.

~~~
omarkassim
This is one of my frustrations. You as the company should be able to go in and
remove that network - it's for your company at the end of the day.

It's like having a LinkedIn or Facebook page - you should be able to exercise
some control over it, including removing it should you wish to.

------
magic_haze
This is an unrelated rant, but aargh... what is up with the use of that text-
shadow for _normal_ text? It's showing up everywhere nowadays: I don't mind it
for headings, but how does anyone find it easier to read for huge blocks of
text? And it almost always is accompanied by scrollbars that are super laggy.

------
jwb119
>Why oh why have you guys built and application that I can’t leave easily?

I feel your pain, but isn't it obvious though? Increase the pain of leaving
and you increase the likelihood of staying. Annoying, but effective.

~~~
simonw
I'd imagine there's a more innocent reason: deleting things is HARD in systems
designed to scale. There are likely to be denormalisations, multiple redundant
copies, separate search indexes, caches... bulk deleting an account actually
ends up involving a fairly large amount of code.

~~~
dsl
No its really not. I worked on a system where the average user had hundreds of
thousands of objects across dozens of servers.

The delete button sets an account flag saying "this user is deleted." The
front end UI honored that and no longer showed the user. A half dozen DELETE
tasks were then tossed into a job queue, one for each major subsystem (cache,
archival storage, etc). The visual effect of deletion was instant and within
20 minutes everything was gone.

~~~
ericflo
You just described a (perfectly reasonable) system which would take a
nontrivial amount of code to build.

------
ninjastar99
I had this EXACT same issue with Yammer about 8 months ago. The experience of
canceling my account made me want to bolt off their system and killed any
hesitation I had. I checked out Presently (<http://present.ly>) the next day
and after a week of using it, it erased all of our data randomly. No go. Not a
great first impression. The following week we discovered Socialcast. And we've
been VERY happy with Socialcast (<http://www.socialcast.com>) since that time.

~~~
afrombie
Glad to hear you are enjoying Socialcast. Would love to chat with you sometime
about your experience and how we can improve the service. Drop me an email if
you want to chat, tim [at] socialcast.com.

------
ericflo
I fail to see why people want to delete their accounts when they decide not to
use a service any more. Why not simply stop logging in?

With Yammer it at least makes a little sense because there's possibly
sensitive business data on there.

But I built and ran a moderately successful Facebook app and people bugged us
about it constantly until we built the feature, but the motivations behind
wanting to delete an account just baffled (and continues to baffle) me.

~~~
omarkassim
I think the whole delete your account and in this case your network was
motivated by having a tremendous amount of private company information on
there. Some of it was harmless, but if given the choice it would be better
that it were removed from the servers of what is a third party at the end of
the day.

~~~
ninjastar99
You are 100% correct - that was the exact situation with us. If we're leaving
a service, and we were told we were in control of that data, any remotely
diligent security process would involve exporting all data on the service in a
secure manner, then removing the data from the control of the third party
provider.

------
bkudria
We're thoroughly disappointed that this experience with Yammer and our exit
process didn't work out. The reality is that, up until this point, we hadn't
gotten too many requests to batch delete all the data within a company
network. As you all know, like in any quickly-growing startup, we need to
prioritize what we build. We've always focused on the most requested features.
That being said, we really have learned from this experience. We're
considering ways in which we can communicate user and message deletion better
to our users.

Of course, we've considered this issue in the past. There's also a business
reason we haven't focused on building one-click network delete: we want to
protect our customer companies from irreversible damage that can be caused by
deleting an entire network. Each free user can delete only their own content,
since only they _own_ their content. You can still deactivate another user,
for whatever reason, but if that user has an active email account, they can
reactivate. As a premium user, which gives you admin controls, you are able to
delete entire user accounts with all underlying posts.

We can do a better job of communicating the process of deletion and
deactivation and the role that account type plays in the process. However,
currently, we aren't able to offer the one-step network delete. Please rest
assured that we take data security very seriously, regardless of the type of
account you have.

I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts on this.

\- A Yammer Engineer.

~~~
omarkassim
Thanks for being upfront about it - finally!

I understand where you're coming from - I wouldn't expect this to take
priority. I do however continue to think that having a delete feature /
account closure feature is fundamental to any SaaS application today -
especially one aimed towards businesses.

What continues to frustrate me is being told that you as Yammer are unable to
actually carry out this process yourself. That doesn't make any sense to me -
you have access to your servers don't you?

I think there's a gap in what Support is saying and what any slightly
technical user knows is possible - even if the "feature" isn't available on
the front end.

~~~
bkudria
I'm sorry for the lengthy delay before the response. Hopefully we'll get
better at this in the future.

I agree - this functionality is justifiable. However, we have many things we'd
like to implement, and this one wasn't prioritized for the reasons I
mentioned.

I'm sorry we told you this couldn't be done. In actuality, this reached the
attention of our engineers quite late. As I understand, you first spoke with
our support staff, and then with our community manager, after this thread.
You're right about the gap - this is theoretically possible, but it just
hasn't been implemented. At all.

It's also not exactly simple: we denormalize data in lots of places, there are
plenty of nasty side cases relating to inter-related networks, the data lives
in many separate systems, and of course everything is backed up. Getting rid
of a single network is more than just a DELETE query. This is lots of code to
write and test.

I hope that helps explain our response.

------
gnubardt
Technical considerations aside it's still good practice to make it easier for
customers to cancel. It makes them feel more comfortable signing up. Joel
wrote a few great articles on it:
<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/23.html>

------
trotsky
If your new solution ends up making you unhappy you're probably much more
likely to switch back if you can just resubscribe and have all your old data
back.

If you trusted them with your data while you were using it they probably
weren't expecting you to not trust them anymore once you left. Even as you
delete every user by hand surely all that data is backed up somewhere?

~~~
ninjastar99
I signed up for Yammer with the re-assurance that I would be in control of my
company's data. And that the service could be cancelled at any time. Having to
make TWO phone calls to cancel my account for a web-based system is absolutely
inexcusable, unless it's 1995. The experience took me from mildly unsatisfied
to livid in record time. I ran, not walked, away from Yammer after that.

------
pbreit
People probably think that Yammer purposefully makes it difficult when the
reality is that 1) departing customers are a small fraction of users and 2)
it's difficult to prioritize highly a feature to "close an account".

~~~
omarkassim
Should closing an account really even be considered to be a "feature". It
should just be there - a basic building block of every application.

~~~
skrebbel
wait, basic building blocks of applications aren't features?

~~~
omarkassim
A feature is what ever you make it out to be by definition. You could call a
text field or a button a feature if you wanted to.

I just think that closing your account is something more fundamental that
being what we traditional think of as a 'feature'.

~~~
true_religion
Ah, but you _can_ delete your Yammer data. You just can't do it in batch.

It's not a priority anywhere to implement batch features, even if it were the
opposite---batch additions.

------
aneth
From the website of al bogari Holdings, the company Omar is the CEO of:

"If you have previously agreed to us using your personal information for
direct marketing purposes, you may change your mind at any time by writing to
or emailing us at marketing@albogari.com"

Case in point of building features valuable to customers and the company
before those that are not. Why is there no feature on this website to
unsubscribe from marketing, just as there is to subscribe? Because it's work
to build one, and it doesn't have immediate benefit to the company.

On a side note, as CEO of a 35 year old international holding company - I find
it odd that Omar is claiming to be the "little guy" in this thread.

