what the UK’s subscription crackdown really tells us about customer experience
The new UK rules on subscriptions aren’t just a compliance story. They’re a behavioural science story, and a wake-up call for any brand that’s been quietly engineering inertia rather than earning loyalty.
Have you ever tried to cancel a subscription and found it strangely, almost suspiciously, harder than signing up?
You’re not alone. The UK government estimates that subscription traps cost consumers around £400 million every year. That’s the price of designs that take one click to join and a small ordeal to leave. New legislation is now stepping in to tackle it, with a simple principle at its core: make it as easy to leave as it is to join.
On the face of it, that sounds like a regulatory tidy-up. But underneath, it’s something much more interesting. It’s a public admission that a lot of digital experiences have drifted away from serving customers, and started subtly working against them.
Friction didn’t appear by accident
The uncomfortable truth is that most of the friction customers experience in cancellation journeys hasn’t happened by mistake. It’s been deliberately designed in. Hidden links. Buried settings. Forced phone calls. Cancel buttons that suddenly require a password reset, two-factor authentication, and the patience of a saint.
Some business models have come to rely on this. The thinking goes: if we make leaving hard enough, a meaningful percentage of people won’t bother. It looks great on next quarter’s numbers. It doesn’t look as great when you think about what it’s actually doing to the relationship.
This is a business model that behaves more like a prison than an attractive hotel. And in the long run, no brand wants to be remembered for the moment a customer felt trapped.
The difference between a nudge and sludge
To understand what’s gone wrong, it helps to go back to one of the original ideas behind behavioural design.
In Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein introduced the concept of a nudge, a small design choice that makes it easier for people to make better decisions. Smaller plates to help with portion control, default opt-ins to pension schemes and clearer labels on healthier food. The intent is benign: reduce effort, guide good choices, respect autonomy. This approach is the guiding principle in our work at Fabricx, to create and deliver experiences with the customer’s best interests at heart.
Sunstein later coined a name for the opposite of a nudge. He called it sludge.
Sludge is friction by design. Extra steps, confusion, delay, those forms that ask the same question three times. You’ll recognise the annoyance at cancellation flows that route you through six screens of guilt-trip messaging. The intent is the inverse of a nudge: increase effort, slow the decision down, and rely on people giving up.
When sludge becomes intentional and scaled, we enter the territory of dark patterns. Design choices that don’t help customers make better decisions, they manipulate them into decisions they probably wouldn’t make if everything was clearly laid out.
Why dark patterns work, and why they shouldn’t
Dark patterns work because they tap into predictable, well-documented quirks of human thinking. The same behavioural biases that good experience design uses to help customers can be inverted to keep them stuck.
🧠 Cognitive load. The more effort something takes, the less likely we are to do it. Add steps, add thinking, and you reduce action. It’s not laziness, it’s a feature of being human.
🧠 Status quo bias. We tend to stick with the current situation, even when it’s clearly not the right one. Inertia is comfortable, while change is effort.
🧠 Loss aversion. Losing something feels roughly twice as powerful as gaining the equivalent. So once we have access to a service, the idea of “losing” it weighs heavier than the cost of keeping it.
🧠 Hyperbolic discounting. We prioritise short-term ease over long-term benefit. That’s why we sign up quickly to a free trial and tell ourselves we’ll cancel later. When in reality later rarely comes.
These biases are part of how we’re wired. The question isn’t whether to use behavioural science in customer experience, it’s whose interests it’s being used to serve.
The test that changes the conversation
Here’s a simple way to look at any journey you’re responsible for.
✅ Is leaving as easy as joining?
✅ Are we adding friction, or removing it?
✅ Would this feel fair if we explained it face to face to the customer?
✅ Are we helping the decision, or exploiting it?
If you wouldn’t be comfortable explaining a particular design choice openly to the customer, it probably shouldn’t be there. That’s a sharper test than any compliance checklist.
What ethical behavioural design looks like
The opportunity sitting underneath this legislation isn’t just to remove sludge. It’s to rethink how we use behavioural science altogether.
Ethical behavioural design uses the same insights as dark patterns, but in service of the customer rather than against them. In practice, that looks like:
✅ Reducing cognitive load, not inflating it. Make the right action obvious and the supporting information clear.
✅ Being transparent. No hidden steps. No disguised choices. No fine print that contradicts the headline.
✅ Aligning incentives. If the best decision for the customer hurts the business, the issue isn’t the customer’s decision, it’s the business model.
✅ Earning retention, not engineering it. People should stay because they value what they’re getting, not because leaving is too much trouble.
🧠 A thought for you
Behind every user journey is a person with limited time, limited energy and a lot going on. When we add friction, confusion or pressure, we’re not just designing flows. We’re shaping how people feel about the brand. And feelings, far more than features, drive long-term loyalty.
The new legislation is, in many ways, a reset. A public signal that the industry has drifted too far in one direction. But the brands that will come out of this strongest aren’t the ones doing the bare minimum to comply. They’re the ones using the moment to look at every journey honestly and ask whether it’s genuinely serving the customer, or relying on them getting stuck.
In a world full of sludge, being genuinely human might just be the biggest competitive advantage available.
In this episode of The Customer Experience Lab , we look at rethinking the psychology of promotions.
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