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Comment by jenthoven | Hacker News Reader

Hey - I totally agree it can be annoying, especially since Drift asks users to enter their email address and people are worried about spam. So it’s a tradeoff between annoyance at the pop up and the support users get when they have problems. Our website is a video editing tool, so we decided that it’s more important to have someone to answer questions than to avoid “peeing off” users.

And, regardless of how annoying a chat box is, the findings of this article still stand...[This is Julia btw, the author of this post]

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Not sure if you're familiar with it, but Ling's Cars is a high-touch website with live-chat elements that ... whilst in a different area than yours, may prove useful.

The rationale is given by Ling herself here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xZZ1c7diUI

I've written my own theory of the site (it is ... something else...) at Ello:

https://ello.co/ferdiz/post/p3wjs7hvw0zq-7qdrmyvea

(Also submitted to HN a ways back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9574350 )

Nutshell:

One of the costliest elements for a car sales outlet is tire-kickers: people who come by, look at vehicles, tie up a salesperson's time, and don't buy anything. More to the point, they never planned to buy anything....

The auto dealership (online or off) wants to sort out the tire-kickers as quickly as possible. If you aren't currently and really shopping for a car, you're a liability. And the chances are the salesperson's missing out on one of the four people who might actually have a real interest in buying that day. The goal is to sort you as quickly as possible.(

Ling'sCars.com is optimized for driving away people who don't really, really, REALLY want to buy a car.*

Not saying you want to drive people away. But you also probably want to not spend much time interacting with anyone that's not really interested in your product.

'Ling'sCars.com is optimized for driving away people who don't really, really, REALLY want to buy a car.'

...and also people who want to preserve their eyesight?

I leased a car from Ling's site once. She's actually very business-like in real-life. At the time she was doing deals way better than the competition - still the early days of business leasing back then. Not sure how competitive she is now but the site certainly looks the same?

> especially since Drift asks users to enter their email address and people are worried about spam.

Huh, okay. (Why bring up some other site?)

> Our website is a video editing tool, so we decided ..

I don't quite follow - how does that fact justify using this particular dark UI pattern?

>>Why bring up some other site? Sorry for not being clear. "Drift" is the name of the messaging widget we use to support Kapwing's chat bot. If a user responds to the welcome message on Kapwing, they're automatically prompted for their email (kind of in a side bar to the message box). I feel like this makes the chat bot a bit more annoying to users who choose to respond to the initial message.

>> how does that fact justify using this particular dark UI pattern? We just made a product call and decided that the benefits, both for us and for our users, of having a chat box outweighed the annoyance. When people have problems using our tool, they really want help, and it isn't that difficult for the rest of our site visitors to swipe away or ignore the chat box.

Drift is the chat app that's being discussed by the post she's responding to.

> A dark UI pattern.

I disagree. Dark UI is manipulation of the user. For example, hiding 'X' buttons on pop-ups asking for a subscription. (Is refusing to pay for value provided a dark 'pattern' on the part of users?)

This pop-up does not manipulate the user. It is an honest value proposition. So is "Fifty Shades of Grey." I didn't buy it.

The manipulation in this case is that a naive user assumes there's a real person on the other end who has noticed them browsing the site and decided to take some time out of their day to initiate a conversation with them.

It's a classical sales tactics that builds on social pressure, here taken to a more dishonest level - the chat box was initiated by some code, in spite of what the text message implies.

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