Agustín | Lead Product Designer

CONCEPT PROJECT

RETENTION STRATEGY

UX RESEARCH

ArenaPass: From Hostage to Ally

A proactive concept project proposing the transformation of a hostile cancellation flow into an ethical "Hibernation" feature. Designed to theoretically reduce seasonal churn and preserve Lifetime Value (LTV) through radical transparency.

A mobile UI design for a sports subscription app centered on a dark background. The screen features a sunset racetrack header and the headline 'The 2025 season has ended.' It displays a retention message offering to pause the subscription until March, with a prominent blue primary button and a discreet 'Cancel account' text link below.

01 / THE CHURN BLEED

The High Cost of Friction

Role: UX Researcher & Product Designer (Concept Project).

Timeline: 2025 - 2026

For this concept case study, I tackled a prevalent issue in the sports streaming industry: cancellation flows that rely heavily on "dark patterns." Users attempting to cancel at the end of the season face a hostile maze designed to artificially retain them.

— The User Pain: Subscribers felt trapped, leading to severe frustration, brand damage, and an influx of angry support tickets.

— The Business Pain: While short-term metrics might look stable, long-term Lifetime Value (LTV) tanks. Once users finally escape the maze, they rarely return.

— The Project Goal: I challenged myself to redesign the exit experience, proving that reducing friction and mitigating seasonal churn are not mutually exclusive.

02 / RADICAL TRANSPARENCY

Designing for Trust

Instead of hiding the exit door, I designed a better waiting room. I introduced the concept of "Hibernation"—a feature allowing users to intuitively pause their subscription during the off-season without losing their account history.

— Ethical Offboarding: Replaced guilt-trip messaging with a clear, value-driven choice between pausing and canceling entirely.

— Seamless Reactivation: Designed a frictionless return path, treating paused users as future active customers rather than lost revenue.

Close-up of UI components featuring a primary blue button with white text that reads 'Pause payments until March' and a secondary, underlined text link below it for 'Cancel account permanently,' demonstrating clear visual hierarchy and retention strategy.

A flowchart diagram of an A/B test experiment for user retention. It shows a 50/50 user split between Control (A) leading to Churn, and Variant (B) leading to Hibernation (Retained LTV). Below, the experiment logic states a hypothesis on higher retention rates and a guardrail metric for revenue cannibalization.

03 / VALIDATION STRATEGY

A Framework for Testing

In a real-world scenario, convincing stakeholders to make cancellation easier requires rigorous data. To support this concept, I developed a strategic validation framework that a Product team could deploy to measure success.

— Proposed A/B Testing: Pitting the legacy "hostile" flow against the new "Hibernation" flow to measure true cancellation rates versus pause rates.

— Qualitative Metrics: Conducting user interviews and monitoring support ticket volume to confirm if brand trust and user autonomy directly correlate with retention.

04 / PROJECTED OUTCOMES

Preserving Lifetime Value

The strategic hypothesis of this redesign is that offering a transparent pause option converts hard cancellations into hibernations. Based on behavioral psychology models, this approach theoretically eliminates the customer support bottleneck and builds brand loyalty. Ultimately, this concept serves as a blueprint showing how ethical design can be a highly profitable retention strategy.

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