Teardown: Five-Star's Reverse Trial Downgrade Flow
Objective: Given a synthetic downgrade-flow specimen (in-app messaging plus an email sequence) for a branch loan-officer app's premium AI underwriting assistant, identify which parts follow reverse trial best practice and which recreate the lesson's four common mistakes.
You're auditing UX copy at Five-Star Business Finance, the Chennai-headquartered, NSE-listed MSME lender, ahead of rolling a 30-day reverse trial of 'Star AI Underwriter' out to its full branch network.
Read the specimen downgrade sequence end to end, flag every defect against the lesson's common-mistakes list, and don't get fooled by messaging that sounds reassuring but still commits a mistake.
Before you start
What you'll need
Free path (everything below is enough to finish)
Free, sufficient for a structured defect log
The process
Specimens to review
Identify every defect in this downgrade sequence, rate its severity, and explain why it undermines the reverse trial's loss-aversion mechanic.
STAR AI UNDERWRITER — 30-DAY TRIAL DOWNGRADE SEQUENCE (synthetic, branch loan-officer app) Day 28 in-app banner: 'Your Star AI Underwriter trial is ending soon. Upgrade to keep instant risk scoring.' Day 30, 11:58 PM: trial access silently removed. No further notice sent. Day 31 email: 'Your Star AI Underwriter trial has ended. Upgrade now to restore instant risk scoring.' (Underwriting notes and risk-score history created during the trial are deleted from the branch dashboard as part of the downgrade, per the engineering ticket linked in the email.) Free-tier dashboard: no visual indicator distinguishes which loan files were scored with AI assistance versus manually, and no upgrade prompt appears anywhere in the free tier after day 31.
Specimen: synthetic, realistic
Final deliverable
A defect log rating each downgrade-flow issue by severity, mapped to the specific common-mistake it recreates.
See a reference example
Utkarsh Small Finance Bank, downgrade flow defect log (excerpt) CRITICAL: Trial-created customer notes deleted on downgrade Ref: managing-downstream-churn-and-retention MODERATE: Single day-28 warning banner only, no day-30 notice Ref: common-mistakes-in-reverse-trial-design
Success criteria
You're done when you can:
- Correctly identifies all 4 planted defects with matching severity
- Does not flag any of the 3 distractors as defects