Chat Bubble Blindness | Hacker News Reader

Chat Bubble Blindness

atlistmaps.com

283 pointsquickthrower2186 comments

I too always find the Intercom or similar bubbles incredibly annoying, intrusive and distracting, especially when a bot pops up saying something that I absolutely don't need to focus on.

I think the purpose of this bubble is to promote Intercom. It's for sales/marketing people who see it elsewhere first (but never use themselves) and think it's a great idea. Next thing you know, there's an order coming from the C-level to engage with Intercom and integrate it.

The effect of the integration is that some people will talk and it will seem like an improvement - compared to zero interactions previously, no doubt it is. As a consequence of this, nobody bothers to check if it's the best way to integrate the chat functionality.

(Although this is only one of the 1000 things that are wrong on the web today. All sorts of unnecessary things that you need to ignore, neutralize, refuse, dismiss etc. before you can get to the content.)

The most frustrating experience is when I'm already paying for an app and intercom constantly nags me and gets in the way of me using the actual app.

I recently tried to buy an electric skateboard ($1000+) and couldn’t get to the add to cart button because of the chat interface. A competitor had a similarly rated/speced board so I bought theirs.

Why not just remove it with inspect element?

Because fuck intrusive sales. Shouldn’t need developer tools to buy a product.

Bit much to have to hack around on a website to give that website your money.

Why reward bad UX?

That was actually my line of thinking. I was on mobile and it didn’t work. I jumped onto my laptop and still didn’t work. I felt I had put in enough effort at that point. If I didn’t have what I felt was a fairly perfect substitute in the competitors product maybe I would have tried harder.

Because you're shopping for a skateboard not a web app.

maybe they were on their phone?

That requires multiple clicks to 'fix' someone else's website. There should be a more automated (but still suboptimal) solution where you can add Intercom to your ad blocker though.

Serves you right for thinking you needed a $1000 electric skateboard. Indulgent techie!

There was an article yesterday about the lack of increased web page performance to match the constantly growing infrastructure - one item that came up was the fact that many sites have unnecessary features that no one asked for. This quote:

> We first added Intercom when we launched Atlist— it just seemed like the startup thing to do.

Seems like a perfect example of a feature that wasn't born out of demand or a perceived demand - it was just one of the bells and whistles available as freebies in frameworks so why not throw it in there.

Isn't it weird that we have entire companies like Intercom or Rasa whose value add is pushing automated, AI-driven "assistants" onto websites, and then the companies that buy into that entire value add and codebases hacked on by ML experts find that none of it even works better than how it was in 1998?

I could understand the thought process at first glance. NLP is revolutionizing things. Startups want the lastest technology if it's backed by Arxiv papers underneath enough layers. There is the image of people working dead-end jobs in call centers answering questions that nobody wants to spend time on but need to get answered anyways. So why not just make all of that go away, by inserting this ready-made digital replacement into your package.json?

I feel like the point is being missed though. Because even a call center employee working at Comcast is still a human. I think people are getting way too ahead of themselves in thinking code and "neural" networks (what a misleading term) can suddenly automate all of these things that could never be automated before, like dynamic conversations. And even before that the article proves that a single HTML form element is 62% more effective than a VC-backed GPT2-powered "solution" to a problem nobody had. Why require a dynamic conversation at all if e-mail works better?

Maybe there's some property about human interaction with founders or call center workers that's fundamentally impossible to replicate with technology, at the philosophical level, and we'd be better off investing into human resources instead of spending all of this engineering effort trying to work around that fact. Or maybe there theoretically isn't such a limitation, but I have serious doubts that 2020 is the year we'd finally be ready to declare that we've gotten past them.

While intercom's advertising may like to tout bots and AI chat, I can't imagine that is why most companies use it. They have a plethora of other features, sort of like proactive marketing automation that make it useful.

If it were just about the chat we would have dropped them for a cheaper solution long ago.

They continue to roll out new features and charge more and more for them though, so they will eventually run us off. Just not yet.

It's unfortunate because AI in its current form has properties that would be amazing for human labor augmentation, but I would argue that the kind of AI system you can get for less than $10 million/1-2 years development time is not really well suited to replace a human agent.

The ML sprinkled over MS Office, Facebook's image tagging interface, GMail are often very useful to me, but I can't see anyone finding the suggestions so reliable they would be comfortable letting the systems silently work without guiding the process and approving changes.

It's good to have someone keeping an eye on the customer interactions. If you have such a deluge of support requests that this is a problem, maybe the actual solution is a simpler process or better communication up front.

> 62% more effective

This is the thing that is odd to me about this article.

They increased the number of conversations, ok. But are conversations valuable? How about actual conversions (not conversations)?

If conversions remained the same, but conversations went up, it seems pointless.

I see this issue a lot with social media, everyone wants to have share buttons and so on, but few step back and think about if that even makes sense and if their customers even want to engage with them in that way.

There's a perceived need for a Facebook page or Twitter, but how much value does it really add to either party. Especially in commerce where conversion correlates with speed, is it really worth paying that performance cost? As an example, last week I removed a bunch of integrations for a client that were adding no value and adding roughly 1.5s to First Contentful Paint.

Though as a strategy, it sometimes pays off to hurt your competitors by focusing them on features that are useless or cost them money.

I hate those Intercom bubbles and hope they go out of business, but probably won't for the reasons you listed.

Wow, I love them. They can be annoying but it's super helpful to click one button for support on sites I use.

I have used them as a business owner of an e-commerce shop and they were surprisingly useful for our customers. I was reluctant to add one to the site but it was absolutely worth it. I did always wish that there was a way to integrate the chat window in to the page layout, though - I think that would be much less obnoxious than the chat bubble pop-up. I started trying to build one like that but never finished.

Am I the only one that finds the automatic popup chat really intrusive? I generally leave the website shortly after.

Give me the option, if I need it I will use it. Force it on me I will leave

I think whether or not this is true for a site depends heavily on the target demographic. Highly technical people with above-average focus would probably see it as an interruption and view it negatively.

Agree

Automatic popups are like the annoying salesmen in stores asking you unsolicited questions.

(The floating bubble doesn't help as well even if it's more discrete, and I believe not a lot of people associate it with "live chat")

Fake chatbot popup: "Hello and welcome, my name is Maria. How can I help you?"

Me: "Go away."

As retail stores started to die, some smart cookie said:

"Hey, remember those people who follow you around the store and intruded as you were just browsing? Those sucked! Let's bring that to the web". And lo, chatbots were born.

The worst ones are the embeds that open a small window within the page. Hope you didn't want that content in the bottom-right.

Those people followed you around because it led to higher sales overall. Or at least that's the idea. Pushy salesmen tend to move more product than laid back cashiers, even if the former tends to be more annoying.

I worked at a Best Buy back in the day and the name of the game was upselling. My most annoying coworkers were quite successful.

It's interesting that this apparently actually works, because I've never once been upsold anytime by one of these employees. Is it a specific type of person that it works on?

Speaking from experience, you're most likely to be upsold if you don't know what you're looking for. For example, I've been upsold when I was buying a printer. I know nothing about printers, so much of the purpose of going to Best Buy was to see what they had and what the salesperson recommended.

Most HN members are unlikely to be upsold due to high technical knowledge. You are probably more likely to have done research ahead of time and know exactly what you're looking for.

it's like online ads, if they manage to upsale to 5% customers it's still a huge win.

Do you do a bit of research on your purchase before heading into a store? If yes, then that might be a big reason.

I'm sure it works for conversions of people already there. I do wonder how it affects traffic long-term because the store feels annoying. That's harder to measure.

Customers who leave don't show in either salesperson group's KPIs.

Ha, that's actually no longer the case. Stores like Best Buy do track foot traffic and it's accounted for in KPIs. My manager would have us enter and leave around the security sensors so we wouldn't inflate that number.

This is an American disease. In most European countries staff might great you, but they will try to discreetly shadow you and once you act like you need a help they will step in to assist.

I absolutely hated the US diners with multiple 'are you ok? do you need anything?' interruptions during single meal. I know why it happens, I just find it really annoying.

It’s not just annoying but they EXPECT you to stop whatever conversation you’re talking, at ANY moment, like they’re the pre emptive multitasking kernel. And then proceed to offer “specials” well into the meal. Dude I don’t know you. You want a good tip? I would rather use an app to order whatever I need. I came to talk to a friend, family member or about a business deal. There is a time to interrupt and that’s ONCE, when you’re taking the order, and then when you’re bringing food MAYBE.

I would LOVE to have a restaurant where I can order from my phone at the table, signal waiters etc. And get a notification when food is ready so we can both choose when they will bring it out.

There’s a Japanese restaurant in Boulder, CO that does something similar. There’s a little cube shaped dongle on the table and depending on the orientation it notifies the server of “I’m ready to order”, “Table service needed”, “check please”, etc. It worked surprising well.

Here’s a link if you’re ever visiting and want to check it out: https://goo.gl/maps/5tiXvJDC9DBXoHYt8

That's a nice idea! I found a picture of the dongle you describe in the restaurant's photos: https://goo.gl/maps/H3C9HVxtpfihCntv6

That's the one!

Bubba Gump shrimp has signs on the table that say run Forrest run or stop Forrest stop. Simple solution.

brazillian churrascaria rodízios[1] tend to have that too, for when you want more meat, and when you're "taking a break".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod%C3%ADzio

America is way behind the curve here. It's typical for a South Korean restaurant to have a button on the table. The staff will only come over if you press the button.

It's a much more pleasant experience overall.

I was at a restaurant where each table had a QR code printed on it, containing the URL of a webpage where you could order food and drinks for that table. I was there with some friends who didn't notice the QR code. They were quite confused when the waiter came over to give them menus and me my first drink. :)

all the restaurants in LA's koreatown (and little tokyo, incidentally, because many are korean-owned) have those buttons too.

i'm of mixed opinion--it's good when you want to be left alone to chat with your tablemates, but when you need lots of service, it can be annoying (and make you a little self-conscious). the nice thing is that you can usually still just flag down one of the usually abundant servers (back before lockdown).

Actually, many chain restaurants in the US (Chili's, TGIFridays, etc.) now have a tablet at the table. You can do things like order drinks, dessert, etc. without flagging someone down. You can pay with credit cards. There are games for bored kids to play (for a fee, usually, though). I found it rather annoying because of course it has to advertise throughout your whole meal. Luckily there's no sound, but it displays other things you could be ordering. But it is really convenient for getting service more quickly and checking out without hassle.

I feel like those are way over-engineered though. I don't need a whole tablet with games and videos of the specials and the full menu. I just need the equivalent of a flight attendant button. That's it.

Every time I go to a restaurant with one of these ad tablets, I just turn it so that it’s facing away from the rest of the table. I can use it when I want to pay or something, but I don’t have to see all the ads.

I forget the name, but when I was in college there was a Mexican buffet chain that had a flag on the table if you needed refills, etc. I used to go there with my friends and the flag went up 5 minutes in and never came down.

We ate a lot then. Me and my friends were the terrors of buffet lines all across town ...

Thanks to Covid, I have been to multiple restaurants where you are assigned a table number and order from your phone (generally via the app they already have set up for take out). It’s not as good as Michelin star service, but it’s way better than bad service. And you never have to wait for a check.

> In most European countries staff might great you, but they will try to discreetly shadow you and once you act like you need a help they will step in to assist.

This is even worse (to me) because most of the time there's nothing discreet about it.

I'd rather have someone ask up front if I need help - at which point I can politely say no - than just follow me around the store, silently watching, like a hyena stalking a wounded gazelle.

He's being a bit hyperbolic. As I'm also European, I can tell you employees are off doing their own thing. If you do need help, you have to go find one.

In my experience, this is a global phenomenon that's probably driven more by management philosophy than by geography. It's endemic to e.g. luxury retailers and trickles down from there.

The stalking thing seems hyperbolic. In my experience as both shopper and employee, many seek to have as few conversations as possible.

The other nice thing about being asked up front is the ability to say yes, but I will ask for help when I need it. The staff are usually much easier to find when you do have a question or need something to be retrieved, yet you don't have to deal with them if you don't need them.

Maybe a bit harsh, but it's still really interesting. I'm super glad some American supermarkets now have self-checkouts, and will use them where I can. Not only are the cashiers often unreasonably cheerful, but having someone bagging your stuff feels super weird. To be fair, it's possible having a bagger (?) is more efficient, because it increases throughput. But it still creeps me out to stand there passively doing fuck-all.

Maybe chat bubbles are similar? Taking away someone's initiative might work well for things they don't want to do, but for people who know what they want or just doing research, it doesn't seem like a good plan.

I work in Grocery IT. We generally assume you have to have two self checkouts in order to meet the customer/item throughput of one staffed checkout. And even then, I'd tend to put my money on the staffed checkout.

Some of it is just the limitations of a SCO, in that store staff don't have to wait for each item to be weighed by the lane before moving to the next item, but a lot of is that most people are not nearly as fast as they think they are.

A lot of it depends on how hands-on the staff manning the SCOs are as well. The Costco near me implemented SCOs in the past year, but those might as well be full checkouts with the number of staff that are around them looking to help out.

Part of the problem is that the self checkouts are super paranoid about preventing theft. If you put your bag on the output you get in trouble, your child puts their hand on the scale you need cashier assistance, you don't wait long enough after the last item for it to be weighed and you need to start . It's literally impossible to go fast! I don't know if it is justified. But it seems surprising as I could easily just put something in my bag if I wanted to steal it, I don't know why I would bother putting it into the scale.

Of course the cashier will always be faster, they are familiar with the interface, know where most of the barcodes are and have the codes of most non-barcoded items memorized.

But self-checkout could be much faster by removing some anti-features (from the customer POV). I have seen a couple of stores with a better solution where you pick up a scanner at the start and scan your items as you go. This has the advantage of parallelizing most of the process instead of clogging up on big expensive machines. In fact with the ability to check out on that device you could probably get by with just a "Customer Service" desk for when something goes wrong.

In the Netherlands, self-checkout doesn't use scales. I simply scan all the items in my basket, and put them in my backpack immediately. Once in a while, you are flagged, and a sample of your items are scanned to make the probability low that you are stealing something. Scanning the loyalty card helps to prevent too many checks over time. All in all, the total overhead next to scanning your items is a mere few seconds.

This is a huge contrast with my experience in the UK. Those scanners are talking, are slow to move between states, require you to put everything from one to another scale. This is indeed often slower than a human worker, and amazes me to no end.

That sounds way better, and quite possibly more effective at actually catching shoplifting. My experience in the UK, Ireland US and Canada has been the bad example as you have described.

It seems to be a classic case of bureaucratic risk aversion without proper cost analysis.

Some items like fresh fruits & vegetables are usually loose & sold by weight. How are things like this handled without scales?

There is/are scale(s) in the vegatable/fruit corner, and one next to the self checkout corner.

I much prefer self-checkouts because of the forced conversations cashiers are forced to have and cashiers just being bad at bagging, but they really do slow down the process. The scanner locks for a couple seconds after an item is scanned (even if there is no weight check or other delay screen), presumably to prevent double scanning for slower customers, but it just becomes a giant PITA when I have small items I could scan and toss into my bag in 10 seconds if they'd just remove the delay and it ends up being closer to a minute since it'll probably pause to reweigh a couple times in addition to the normal delay.

Purposefully slowing down every step of the checkout process is the biggest reason I refuse to use self checkout.

I avoid self-checkout at most stores because of this. Just too much a pain in the butt, never mind if I have a lot of items and they can't even fit in the baggage area!

Walmart has this figured out. You just scan the item. Done. No scales, no anti-theft I can tell aside from a person watching.

Walmart just launched a terrible AI self checkout monitor that everyone hates.

I remember Food 4 Less back in the day (maybe twenty years ago) having a sort of hybrid system where the cashier scanned your items and rang then up, but you bagged your own groceries.

Are you familiar with any similar systems today? How do they rate on throughput?

Any grocery store that’s understaffed/busy ATM. As awesome as H-E-B is, I’ve had to bag my own stuff once in a while. It usually feels a bit rushed and seems to annoy the checker if you’re not super-quick about it.

This is the it's always been done in Sweden. With space for two different customers to bag per cashier. A metal divider is put diagonally on the conveyor belt to feed items either left or right.

I'm in Canada, and we have all varieties of this.

The 'metal divider, self bag' is a discount / bulk store I go to. Old-style 'casher + bagger' is another. And I've gone to stores with self-checkout, both with and without scales in them.

Seems quite varied here, with of course that variance mostly along franchise lines...

I only use self checkout in a pinch, in large part as an act of Luddism. Self checkouts take away entry level work. I have a choice to support the workers, so I take it. Not to mention how awful the interfaces are when you're buying fresh veg -- I find that it's usually faster to wait for an available checker. In a lot of grocery stores near me, I do my own bagging and some even have a second conveyer for that purpose.

If you want to support the workers and actually make a difference in someone’s life, get someone to take your bags to your car and tip that person. They get to take a break and walk outside, and make some extra cash under the table.

I don’t think opting-out of self checkout counts as “supporting the workers”.

The more that people use self checkout, the fewer employees the store can get away with. Opting out slows the process of automating jobs away.

As for my car... most often I'm either by transit or walking. Anyway, I could be wrong but I don't think stores offer help out where I live. I've never heard it in the decade that I've lived here.

And I absolutely love the extra care and attention. Dining out in other countries can be a complete hassle as you wait for the waiter to show up... whenever he feels like.

I think some believe this was the reason why Wal-Mart failed in Germany. They brought this "can I help you" with them and German customers rather went to Aldi & co where they could shop in peace.

> "can I help you"

Walmart? Are you sure? They are not known for being helpful, let alone solicitous.

Ironically, the only grocery chain that I can think of where employees actively ask if they can help is Trader Joe's. I can't help but giggle at the fact that they're German-owned, even if this part of the culture came from the American founder.

I read an analysis about Wal-Mart it was mentioned that employees are required to ask every customer within 3 feet. Maybe that has changed in the last 16 years.

Oh I would also be very confused since Aldi is the pioneer when it comes to shopping in peace and w/o frills in Germany.

Are you finding all your news articles alright? Let me know if you want a different size comment thread and I'll check the database.

Car dealerships are the worst. Every. Damn. Page. Has. One. And. No. Matter. How. Many. Times. You. Decline. The. Bubble. Keeps. Popping. Up.

You can block the offending domains with uBlock Origin or similar tool. It's a relatively small effort to block the most used ones after which you won't see most of the popups anymore.

I was shopping for a used car a couple of months ago. I had an question about a car, and figured, what the heck, let's give it a try.

No answer, of course.

Brilliant.

It's particularly frustrating since the pop up "Chat Bot" is almost always just a crappy search "Bot" which does a worse job than the normal search engine.

Given the entire point of the OP, you are clearly not the only one, right?

Same here. I end up blocking those that I notice using uBlock Origin so they never show up again globally.

A simple "live chat" link in the navigation or footer like they've done works so much better than the intrusive popups.

Once upon a time I was signing up for a payment processor, put my information in page 1 then walked away on page 2 to handle dinner or something.

Got a phone call from a Sales rep 10 minutes later asking if I need help filling it out or if I was having second thoughts!

I had to sign up anyway (it was for work), but still... that was a shock.

In my experience chat buttons are close to useless. First of all that's usually not a chat at all at first, there is some bot with a series of dumb checks and links. And if you manage to get a human on the other side they usually have a timer and if you dare to type your reply longer than 30 seconds they will just drop your session at any arbitrary moment with a comment "user didn't respond".

My internal ranking of contact options is like this:

Email - completely useless, won't even try. Nobody ever replied me on my email sent to the contact listed on a company website. (my address is my first plus last name at gmail, so nothing "weird" there)

Chat bubble - almost useless, will try only when desperate, like when other channels don't respond or gated (e.g. phone number gated by ten layer deep voice menu)

Telegram/Whatsapp chat associated with work number - almost always work and quick, but rarely made available for customers. Or available only after you've already contacted them some other way.

Phone - always works but needs a lot of attention and interruption from both parties

>Phone - always works

"Always" seems excessively generous here. There are many times I've contacted a company and reach a human who says "sorry, I can't help you, but you can file a ticket on the website" let alone the times I've received "sorry, we're experiencing more than normal callers, please try again another time" without even the option to wait on hold.

Almost every phone support center I’ve called has been hot garbage even after getting past hold. From the automated options menu, which doesn’t have what you’re looking for, to the rep needing to forward me somewhere else.

Twitter seems to work pretty well for me as well

I would actually put chat bubbles higher than phone. It’s probably the primary way users are supported at my current job (with real humans in the other end) and it works super well. And when I see the Intercom icon, I can almost guarantee that I’ll be talking with a real person (sometimes even the founder) based on past experience.

> Email - completely useless, won't even try

Huh? That's how I always reach out about something, and probably get a response 90% of the time?

I don't think you're giving e-mail enough credit here. Not sure why you think it's useless.

I detest all the synchronous waiting associated with chat/IM/phone hold, I much prefer to send an e-mail and get a reply the next day whenever possible.

If it's a large enough company and/or you're asking for something very specific and not something they are willing to give you, they usually won't even bother replying.

I would much prefer using emails too. My mails are usually to some reseller about specific unmentioned details of the product - like what is the type of power socket, is there a certain feature present in that specific model etc. Anything that is not easily searchable. I assume that regular call operators who probably also read emails don't have an easy answer and just ignore mails altogether.

"And if you manage to get a human on the other side they usually have a timer and if you dare to type your reply longer than 30 seconds they will just drop your session at any arbitrary moment with a comment "user didn't respond"."

I've personally never had that issue, but my formative years on the internet were on IRC, and as a result when I see a chat text box, I usually send chat messages tersely and fast.

  Hey
  I could use some help
  For some reason I can't log in.
  Not sure why?
  Looking at the network
  the login request didn't seem to send my password.

ect.

I've only recently learned that this is apparently not universal behavior. Two of my co-workers at my company actually fill out large, properly formatted, paragraphs of text in the chat box.

There was a point where one co-worker chastised me for continually interrupting them before they could finish writing. Funnily enough, when I talked to them about using a rapid style of fast terse messages, they immediately adapted to using it. So I think this is just a culture thing. It comes down to what your primary modes of communication are.

So with that in mind, I suspect that when you fill out large chunks of text like this, it looks to the support staffer that you started filling out the text, then moved off the webpage and forgot about it. They were likely expecting a terse sentence.

I have a coworker who does this, and personally I can't stand it. Everyone else on our work slack can take 30 seconds and think through what they say in advance. There is a certain rhythm and quantity to the slack notifications he generates; I've never said to myself "oh that's <x>" after the third notification in a row and been wrong.

If even a single other person sent messages this way, maybe I'd change my notification settings and see everything much later and less often. But since it's just him, he annoys me on a regular basis with this behavior. Just... don't press enter. Why can't you write the same things, without pressing the button that makes noises on 12 devices miles away every time you stop to think? Why???

I get where you're coming from here. Ideally your co-worker would, when initiating a conversation, write a well formatted preamble that covers everything they need from you.

I have to say however, that this form of paragraph writing behavior is very irritating when you're stuck their numbly waiting for them to proof read their magnum opus. And you can't just leave and go back to what you were working on because in 4 minutes you're going to get interrupted by another dissertation. So you just have to sit there watching "Alice is typing" as it flicks on and off. When you could have been having an active conversation.

The reason the rapid reply behavior happens is to allow you, who is presumed to be actively looking at the person, to read the text as it is being wrote, so that you can formulate your response quicker.

And keep in mind, the situation where you have the attention of a support employee is that time where they are waiting on you.

So if the take away here is anything, it's:

  * write well before you have someone's attention
  * write fast when you have it
  * be respectful of other people time
  * be mindful of the effects of your actions

* when you have something of non trivial size to discuss, get on voice chat instead handicapping yourself.

I agree, you shouldn't try to get someone's attention before typing a complete thought. But it's the original attention-seeking message that's the problem, not the complete thought. Maybe what I'm saying is that we use Slack at work almost completely asynchronously?

https://www.nohello.com/

This same coworker will also "formulate his response quicker" without letting you finish what you're saying in person, too. Then he'll interrupt you to go on some tangentially related rant, and won't stop unless you interrupt him back or he's repeated all the points of his rant three times. So maybe he's just bad at this in general, and it only happens to manifest as too many notification pings in threads and DMs on slack, when they're not really the core problem here.

That guy sounds pretty high energy. For some odd reason our profession has no short supply of people with social... quirks.

BTW. I've been doing some investigation of Zulip since it showed up on hacker news, and I think it is much better optimized for the style of communication you're describing that your team uses. I recommend investigating it.

Chat systems are for rapid typing -- constant flow of communication.

Bbc/email systems are for long-form communications -- slow, methodical and referencable.

Slack and its friends committed the great crime of conflating the two, to produce systems that are never as quick as you'd like, and never as referencable as you'd like, and no one knows how to effectively communicate on it because there is no effective communication unless all parties forcibly drop back to irc

I also tend to write in separate phrases but usually make an effort to remember and write full message at once and then send. Especially when describing a problem, since I work in QA it's a habit to write every possible relevant info before sending help request.

As an example last time in a "contact bubble" with my cell operator - I had an issue with their app for smart tv, human operator requested me to reboot it, by the time I did it she already hang up. Almost the same happened with my bank, they asked some address, and while I was asking it (like 2-3 minutes tops) they are gone.

PS: I one had a chat with a USA Amazon and that was super helpful, quick and they never hang up even after we were done with discussing a problem, they just waited with open session (I wasn't sure who need to hang first), and asked "do you want anything else?" So sometimes this stuff works fine.

My customers always contact me via email and I always respond and they are happy, so I wouldn't say it's useless.

In the full blog post, they show that the numbers went from:

* Chat bubble: 34 conversations from 8,004 visitors (0.42%)

* Nav link: 45 conversations from 6,622 visitors (0.68%)

It probably performs at least on par with the chat bubble, but it doesn't seem like enough data to say confidently that the navbar outperforms the chat bubble.

I agree that it's a net win to remove the intrusive chat bubble if they're not sacrificing conversations, but the title is overstating the evidence.

I don't think this is statistically significant.

Hi, I'm the author— this is 98% confidence.

I think people are probably more concerned that it doesn't have economic significance. It might have statistical significance, but the effect is still very small, so does it really matter? That's a common trap people forget to consider. You see this a lot in finance research where some variable is statistically significant in a model, but the difference in the economic outcome is so small that it doesn't matter.

In this case, these are indeed tiny percentages. But you're going from something that a lot of people dislike and that is more complicated (from a technical standpoint), so we can simplify things and user interaction with live chat is not impacted.

You'd hope that the percentages here would be small: people need to be facing a problem with your product before they are part of the sample population.

There is a lot of potential economic impact here; during a major problem (which WILL happen) the number of people looking for support would increase sharply. If people are blind to your support system, you could be saying goodbye to a large amount of customers. Ignoring stuff like this is a far more common trap. We spend a lot of money on firefighters, even though we hope they never have any fires to fight.

I disagree, I think it's statistically significant. I ran a quick z-test:

p0 = 34

p1 = 45

n0 = 8004

n1 = 6622

z = -2.0924

p = 0.03662

So, the improvement is statistically significant at 95% confidence (p < 0.05)

As far as practical significance, that's debatable . . .

A z test relies on the normal approximation, no? I don't think that is appropriate with proportions so close to 0.

Hey I'm the original author!

How much data would you need for confidence? According to my calculations this is 98% confidence. That feels like 'enough' to make a decision for my small startup.

I'm pretty explicit in the blog post that this isn't meant to be universally applicable— it's just what happened to us.

First of all, kudos for quantifying your results instead of hand waving them. Yes, your results look like a ~60% improvement in conversion rate from the A to the B test, with a p value of 0.02 and a statistical power of around 80% for a two-tailed test. So that's good.

However context is important - at this level of significance you'd expect to see a similarly strong, but ultimately spurious, effect going from the A to the B test about 1 in 50 times.

Since you're not working on something safety critical, that's probably an acceptable false positive rate for you. But generally speaking, and in particular here since the absolute numbers and changes are quite small, I would be wary of trusting such a result. It seems promising but inconclusive. Maybe run a few more tests with disjoint (or nearly so) samples of visitors?

There are a few other things that could possibly confound the result - off the top of my head, your screenshots look like different pages between the A and B test. I'm not sure if that's how you ran the experiment or if you just happened to use two different page screenshots, but that would typically disqualify the result and require another test.

The way I'm seeing it is sure the error bars are huge. But it's very unlikely to be a regression. And team likes it better.

> screenshots look like different pages between the A and B test

I was also wondering about that

Thanks for sharing. A couple things:

1) Why did the two groups have such different N sizes? If it was intended to be run as a 50-50, a large delta would make me wonder if there was an exposure bias

2) For the baseline rate (0.4%), this test is underpowered for even a 50% change, meaning you will have a high false discovery rate

I'm somewhat of a layman, but I'd wager A/B pages printed 50:50 (by IP for instance) could lead to a rather solid conclusion if ran long enough. On the other hand, eh, chat bubbles suck and you can quite confidently say they don't help, so might as well keep it this way. On a personal note I do feel like I would be much more prone to click a chat request as another menu option than a bubble.

Just as a note: if I ran an A/B test and one bucket had 8,004 visitors and the other had 6,622 visitors, I'd be concerned about the way the test was setup.

There are some valid possibilities to explain the discrepancy, but there are also a lot of possibilities in which the test wasn't setup properly and it isn't measuring the right thing.

When you get a test result that confirms your suspicion, the first thing you should do is challenge those results.

It doesn't look like they A/B tested. More likely just switched to it 100%

Even more of a problem for interpretation of these results...

Personally i dont mind the in web chat features (intercom being one) but what I really HATE is when you click on it and it says 'Were not available pls send us an email'. So program the damn thing with your working hours and dont display a chat bubble if there is no one to chat with at that moment in time. If I want to email I will find your 'Contact Us' page. Sorry for the rant perhaps I am alone in this...

I feel the same way.

That's a bit like when a site scolds you for putting spaces in your credit number, when it could just strip them automatically.

I really hate those live chat bubbles, and many people feel the same way. When I see one of those I instantly go looking for alternatives to your site. Sure, you might win more clicks or whatever, but it's also worth considering the goodwill lost.

It's kind of like hiring a used car salesman to do your sales. Sure, perhaps he'll sell more in the short run, but if that's what you're after there are plenty of unsavory tactics out there you can use. Wouldn't you rather customers just had a good, clean experience they're happy to share with others?

> When I see one of those I instantly go looking for alternatives to your site. Sure, you might win more clicks or whatever, but it's also worth considering the goodwill lost.

I think we should keep in mind that HN readers are far from the typical internet user.

I think somewhere along the line the expectations for what people get when they click on a floating chat box changed.

When we started Olark (http://www.olark.com) in 2009 it was novel to show status before you clicked on the chat button, and to float on the screen.

I both were super important, because like you I hated clicking on a box, button, icon, for instant help and having it say "leave us a message" - and I didn't like having to dig around to find some way to contact a business.

Now-a-days many chat/messaging products occlude presence in favor of collecting as much contact information as possible without letting you know if someone is actually there to answer the question --- or if you will be funneled to a bot.

There are a couple of reasons for this: - the relatively high cost of having a person talk to you. - the allure of getting leads for low cost (i.e. chatbot < $$ than person) - it's far easier technically to ignore presence as boot-time or never even implement it. - the growing lack of user expectation for an immediate response.

I think good human-to-human conversations are essential whether you are starting out or scaling a business. The trick is consumer behavior is changing due to dark patterns.

I think the execution of the the chat bubble (a circle with a strange looking chat icon plus happy face) is not great.

Perhaps "blindness" is an issue. But also the chat bubble execution itself. Do visitors understand what it is?

I wonder what would happen if there were a persistent chat bubble with the text "live chat" or "chat now" "questions?"

In contrast, "Live Chat & Support" in the primary navigation is extremely visible and clear.

I see that circle thing all the time but I had no idea what it did until this moment.

It reminds me of the Lolwut pear more than anything else.

This makes sense to me. I usually assume that there isn't a real person at the other end of those bubbles, and that if there is they'll only be trying to sell me something.

We use Intercom in our product at work. But it's for customer support, and is always initiated by paying customers.

You'd be surprised how many chats start with "Can I talk to a real person please?" and get shocked when I answer swiftly (during working hours of course)

You can write a script: "I'm a real person" and save time

It is really great to see this researched and documented. While not every A/B test is proof, it is compelling in this case - and confirms my long-head view that these chat bubbles are just bad UX. There is a lot of other recent "UX best practices" that are actually worst practices, but because every unicorn is doing it, teams often feel they should do the same - without asking whether this kind of "engagement" is really serving the core product management objectives.

I don’t have chat bubble “blindness” — I have configured my ad blocker to hide them, as well as any other clutter I find distracting. I wouldn’t be surprised if other users, rather than being blind to it, never even know the damn thing is there.

I use the intercom style buttons to chat with sales reps all the time. It's the most convenient method for a few reasons,

1. I never know what forms of contact a website will provide until I navigate around the site to find it.

2. Finding the contact information can be difficult in the first place.

3. With the instant chat I either a) know I will get a quick response, or b) it tells me how long a general response takes.

4. I don't like having to use email for quick questions.

5. I DO like that the chat falls back to email as a response mechanism if the response time is longer than I am willing to wait for.

I do too, I think it's nice to know where to look (I mean, in the corner). But it's annoying when there's no real person, just a nonsense script

Or if the chat widget asks for an email address directly. But then I can just type random letters incl an @

Yeah, there are certainly antipatterns that are in use for customer support.

I find them to be intrusive, and end up ignoring them in the same way I end up not noticing things that look like ads. And sites that overdo it lose my attention altogether - I just move on to greener pastures.

Mind you, I used to mute the television when ads came on. The constant repetition drove me nuts. Radio is even worse, which is why I haven't used one since I was a kid.

Its not that I try to avoid any and all advertising. I think Twitter actually does a good job of it - at least in my feed, as the ads I get are directly related to my interests, and have actually resulted in purchases from me.

It's the constant unwanted disruption. Remember when people hated the <blink> tag in the 90's, or those ads that jiggled? They are all different variations on how to annoy people into thinking about one (generally unwanted) thing all day.

You know who does chat very poorly? LinkedIn. Once those notifications show up on the screen, it's so hard to get rid of them! You have to save messaging to the last on that site if you don't want to see the name list covering the right-edge of the screen, or a chunk out of the bottom when you minimize it.

Their A/B testing results are most likely due to chance.

Using the technique from https://www.evanmiller.org/sequential-ab-testing.html

N = 14626, sqrt(N) = 121

T = 45

C = 34

T - C = 11, far below the 121 required to declare the change a success with 95% probability.

T + C = 79, also below the 121 required to declare no winner.

I must confess I did not recognize that icon from anywhere. Seems like a much simpler root cause is that many others also did not recognize this as a chat icon, particularly those outside of webdev or design circles.

I was coming here to say something similar. There is plenty of data out there that labels are often preferable to icons because people understand words, but don't necessarily understand your icon.

So it may be that there isn't blindness to the icon, just less confusion with the text. You could further test this perhaps by reinstating the icon and labeling it. That might convert even better.

There's not really a lot of context here, why was the bubble annoying him? Were they pushing messages upon the user landing on the page? The real value of the bubble is to engage prospects on marketing sites and landing pages.

Hey I'm the OP— we give more of the story here: https://www.atlistmaps.com/in-good-company/chat-bubble-blind...

Sorry. I didn't submit this!

Some perspective from the other side.

We've found intercom to be a massive improvement in our user conversations, up from when we have a live chat button as well as when we had a direct WhatsApp/chat functionality through a page.

I'm with everyone here in how annoying chat plugins are, in fact I was so against it that I fought tooth and nail to keep it out of our product. I eventually decided i should back it up with data and decided to give it a shot.

Speaking to the users, they love it. We're short circuiting a lot of conversations about usability and "how do I do this" little things that wouldnt have even reached us otherwise.

I rub with all of this is that I think we operate in a different user space than most of the commenters here (but I may be wrong). I say this because I still have chat popups, and it actively turns me off using a product and makes the decision for me in whether I buy something (to a no).

The difference might be that our users skew older - 40s to 50s and up, and are from a very old industry with little tech penetration. Email is still the preferred mode of communication, And they don't escalate anything except complete system failures. Intercom has somehow jumped that gap and makes them talk to us more. I'm as surprised as anyone.

Someone has finally got to it. I hated the bubble for such a long time because I don't think you need chat everywhere and in your face. It reminds me of credit card agents chasing me in malls.

If they were to actually test "chat bubble blindness", you have to replace the bubble icon with the text at roughly the same position and compare. They didn't do that. Rather, they moved the chat to more prominent position - at the top of the page near the center, with bigger space, etc. So of course it increases the engagement.

More important question is if they are getting spurious extra engagement (i.e. more chat traffic eventually costs more money), or they are getting the engagement they want.

Good luck AB testing things in the real world :p

Indeed. I'm not saying they should do a perfect A/B test. Rather, in this case, their conclusion (of "chat bubble blindness") is not a logical conclusion you can draw from the experiment they performed.

No, that's not the conclusion. That's the portion that is explicitly speculation. There are tells in the language:

> The navigation link led to a 62% increase in live chat conversations...This felt like a win— I like live chat but I hate chat bubbles...In any case, don't expect to see a chat bubble on Atlist ever again.

That's the conclusion: "For this page, losing the bubble is okay. We're going to lose the bubble."

> And if I hate them, maybe users hate them too? Maybe users have developed a chat bubble blindness— just like banner ad blindness.

That's the speculation. You can tell because of the 'maybe's in there.

This is actually quite well-written. The conclusions are written in clear language indicating fact. There is a potential "future work" description that speculates on possibilities while expressing the uncertainty.

IMHO very well expressed, good text. But what you've said has made me think about why people sometimes read scientific papers the way they do. They'll say "They claim that this will make fusion power possible" or something like that when those parts are in the "Future Work" section and are therefore unsubstantiated and intended to be a "here are some distributaries of this river of fact".

Interesting. I think the cues are adequate, but clearly they are not for many. I still think they should write the way they do and just accept that some in the audience aren't going to make it there.

I must say that I too have come to absolutely hate the chat popups. They're almost always bots and have some pre programmed rubbish responses. They are not "AI" and dont come close to helping me with anything. In fact, I've come to hate it so much that I have a chome extension that makes sure I never see another one! May I add that since that moment, I've had as much help on websites and I dont feel irate with one less thing popping up as I navigate!

An interesting question is whether they got .24% more chatters or not. Would leaving the chat bubble and having the link lead to .75% of visitors chatting?

They had good reasons for getting rid of it (the “designing around it” issue is a real “tail wags dog” problem), so I’m not suggesting they made any sort of mistake! Just curious if one vs the other appeals to different kinds of ppl in a meaningful way.

Good on them for testing assumptions.

Less than judicious use of any modal/floating element is a problem and adds to user frustration.

It's worth doing an external test with a fresh browser (no {cookies, localStorage, cache, logged out, default browser API permissions for the website} every month or so. With the basically-useless-now cookie disclosure banners, chat banners, adblock warnings, "returning? why don't you log in" modals, special offer modals, location permissions prompt, notification permissions prompt, occasional survey prompts, etc. These make me want to leave your site as fast as I can, sometimes before I bother staying for my purpose.

I think developers tend to be responsible for adding features but few if any people are responsible for removing features when they don't work well together or are no longer as relevant as they could have been.

Also, modals and floating elements are simply overused. They are the equivalent of blinked elements in the early web days. Use sparingly.

Just want to say, I'm happy to hear this. That chat bubble is beyond annoying and many people abuse it to the point where it simply drives me away from the website. It can block screen elements and sometimes it bounces and/or updates the page title so that your browser tab titles changes in an incredibly frustrating way.

between chat popup, cookie notice, notification confirmation, email subscription box... there is very little left to imagination then that this website is obviously on drugs

And with segment, hotjar, google analytics, heap analytic. Jesus, how much analytics do y'all need.

but MORE DATA

I wonder if the conversions went up included a disproportionate amount of mobile users.

The chat bubbles are far too big on mobile devices.

I go out of my way to instantly close them and it does not delight me in the slightest to have to deal with them.

Having a chat button to press that is unobtrusive is a far better layout.

Some pretty lazy maths concerning the statistics:

Assuming there was a 0.545% chance for visitors to start a conversation, and the chance didn't actually change between the tests.

In that case you'd have an ~8% chance to get 34 conversations or less for 8004 visitors, and also an ~8% chance to get 45 conversations or more for 6622 visitors, and there would be just a ~0.66% chance you'd actually see a gap that large (or more accurately: gap between any x<=34 and x=>45) by random chance, suggesting there was probably some change in p in between the tests.

Mind I just played with a specific p of 0.545% here, and also halfassed it.

I suspect that any effect is due to moving from an icon to text. We are inundated with icons. They become hard to see. They are harder to interpret. The meaning of text is much simpler to infer, in fact, it is the main purpose of text.

Intercom was one of the first thing I put on my pihole blocklist. Since them I've had to add quite a few more. The one thing I absolutely cannot stand is making my tab blink like I have a notification.

I leave the site immediately if there’s intercom integration or similar.

This seems like quite an overreaction.

Rip it out of your site. I hate it.

Regardless of whether or not you hate it, for marketing and making sales it is clearly effective. If you hate it SO much and have technical knowledge, just block the Intercom domain or something.

The whole premise of this thread is that it is not effective. Your tone is like it's my problem. It's their problem.

The main problem of those bubbles to me is that they break the UI. Sticking to your own UI gets more engagement as the article pointed out.

I think the lift in conversions is because Intercom bubbles aren't live chat typically, they are a "Contact Us" form or an automated bot (not true "live chat"), so people are starting to ignore them. They changed their message at the top to say "Live Chat" so people click on that more because they are expecting real live chat.

I have noticed some marketers have tried to fix chat bubble blindness by also adding animated popup messaging and sound effects to your chat bubbles. You can tell that consumers like it, because it drives up the interaction rate.

I'd be interested in seeing an A/B/C test between a basic bubble, a noisy bubble, and the text link demonstrated in the linked article.

I get this, I usually ignore this bubble on website and I ignore it even more when it pops up and pretends to chat with me. So, I'm glad someone tried to remove it and got even better results.

god I fucking hate chat widgets that sit there drawing attention to themselves and opening up without any interaction, sometimes I go so far as to use [an ancient page-editing bookmarklet](http://mrclay.org/2006/04/23/mypage-bookmarklet/) to get rid of particularly annoying ones.

I don't think the issue is chat bubble blindness. I think the issue is material design floating action button blindness.

Alright I guess — but as an aside, disabling keyboard scrolling on the page is a really weird design decision.

Can you elaborate?

Edit: I see now, that is not intentional.

On the other hand its a standard UI element that everyone knows. Of course, its often abused.

Chat buttons allow us to troll websites that have no idea what they are doing- most of them.

> it just seemed like the startup thing to do

This motivation sounds like a recipe for disaster.

uBlock Origin and/or Privacy Badger block Intercom. I suspect it's not chat bubble blindness, it's chat bubble blocklist.

I would never have known what this button did.

This relative percentage stuff is silly.

Hey I'm the author.

This links to an Indie Hackers post which doesn't have the full context. You can find the original post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24060501

Sorry OP— just thought I'd point that out :)

This thread should be updated to point to this link

Normally dang (HN moderator) is willing to fix links to make things better. Should probably work here as well.

Is there any way to get his attention for this? That would be amazing...

email him. contact link is in the footer.

Awesome. Just did. Thank you!!

Just wanted to let you know i enjoyed your blog post on Spotify earnings. You do a great job narrating your experiences! https://www.stevebenjamins.com/blog/music-in-the-age-of-algo...

Changed now.

Thanks Steve - no need to say sorry. I was keen to post this as chat bubbles have been grating on me for some time and I am glad someone did some analysis on it!

I doubt this worked because it is less annoying but because it is now easier to locate the button in the first place and it tells you exactly what you need to know about its function.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com