As developers who never need help, we tend to forget that some people might do, and that a Chatbox that annoys us can help them.
Anything that pops up and interrupts me while I'm reading something else is pretty much a deal breaker. Having to stop what I'm doing to hit a little X and get back to it has cost a bunch of companies business from me.
Having said all that, there are a couple of companies that use them in the correct way. The one that springs to mind is xolo.io. Xolo is a one stop shop for my business (expenses, invoicing, tax accounting) and has chat staffed by humans and it's a fantastic way to interact with them (as an existing customer).
I message them, and assuming it's within business hours*, I get a rapid response and answer to my question / solution to my problem.
The supermajority here does, or so I would guess.
We aren’t representative, and that’s important to remember when designing user interfaces.
In context of UI annoyances and regular people, it's also worth remembering that the representative (i.e. not tech-savvy) population accepts what it's given. They don't have the mental models to conceptualize what exactly is it that annoys them, and they don't have a voice to express that annoyance. But they are annoyed, and you can hear that when you actually talk to them. The frequently heard things like "Why did they have to rearrange everything again?", "Google 'xyz contact form' because it's easier than finding it on the xyz site", or "My computer is slow it's probably viruses" are symptoms of that.
A favourite story[1] (and I can't remember where I read it first) is the WWII bombers that the US military were trying to understand how to protect by analyzing the bullet holes. But the bullet holes only told part of the story. Any bomber that made it home to be analyzed had only been hit in a non-critical place.
I'm not saying there isn't a place for chat, because I believe that they're absolutely is. A good, direct to the person chat, or unobtrusive ability to reach out is great.
Shoving it in my face and breaking the flow of what I was doing is not.
While I agree that HN readers aren't representative, I have a hard time believing that other people don't behave the same way when presented with annoying website behaviours (even if they later want the contact with the human).
I've seen behind the scene of businesses that get customers asking stupid stupid questions, so I also understand the where the zendesk 'are you sure this doesn't answer your question' comes from. Doesn't make it any less annoying when applied badly to expert audiences.
I like the WW2 story as well, but when chat increases total interactions and conversions, it’s hard to make a case for survivorship bias.
For example, chat popups that ask you to interact before you've had a chance to even read the title of the page.
Every customer who hasn't purchased yet is part of a funnel, and you absolutely CAN test with an A/B test (or equivalent) whether you're losing people when you annoy them by popping something up on the screen.
And perhaps I'm an outlier. If the A/B test says you get more sales when you annoy the customer, who am I to argue (or it annoys me and not them). But it does mean you will have them as a customer and not me, and that's fine.
I don't think I'm wrong to use this as one of many indicators of how annoying a SaaS is going to be to deal with over the long term.
this. chatbots are significantly less than what they're hyped up to be.
I think one of the most regularly overlooked areas in which people may need help is through accessibility features. I'm not neurodiverse myself, but things that pop-up and animate can be problematic for those that are.
Having the option there may be useful, but the intrusive pop-ups that the previous comment referred to do not seem useful to me, and could even greater confound the experience for groups of people. I'd expect the intrusive features are mostly driven by conversion rates rather than usability.
I've found that most of these chatbots will use sound alerts to draw attention, and Cape's environmental toolkit definitely references these. While a lot of the content in this toolkit is for physical environments, a lot of it will transfer to digital product UX in terms of stimuli etc.
I have an ASD diagnosis. This is the first I've heard of "condition". Neat! Is this to move away from "disorder" because of stigma/negative connotation?
Popups of all kinds, I despise. There should NEVER be any unsolicited modals. That includes chat boxes, "please subscribe to our newsletter", GDPR warnings, and all of them. They all interrupt my attention flow severely. If you're lucky, I will inspect your DOM and will block your modal with injected CSS/JS rules, reload, and keep browsing your site. If you're unlucky, I'll leave and look for other competing sites that are a more pleasant experience. I have clicked out of several sites before that had a stupid "can i help you" Intercom popup. On a few of those occasions I actually replied "no go away" before leaving the site, hoping that they would take the feedback for the future.
Hah. You expect sites to not track you just because you are there for the first time? If that were the case there’d probably be no GDPR.
The unfortunate result is that the goddamn GDPR warnings keep popping up, because ironically, the way those websites remember that you either "accepted" or "denied" the tracking request is to leave a cookie, and I don't allow or want to allow that cookie.
EDIT: Separately, there are many websites that only have an "accept" button and no "decline" button. By blocking the modal dialog boxes, I never actually "accepted", and therefore they never got my permission to track. Ha!
GDPR is about a lot more than just cookies.
>By blocking the modal dialog boxes, I never actually "accepted", and therefore they never got my permission to track. Ha!
Unfortunately they probably treat this as if you accepted the modal (which is against GDPR).
Sure, but they can't track me anyway :)
GDPR is about all tracking - cookies are just one implementation.
I find that stores which do this tend to be more interested in making a sale than ensuring you have something you're happy with and want/need.
What should we expect from sites which behave like this?
And I can agree with you. There is actually nearly always a customer segment that finds chatbots and popups totally annoying. This usually ends up in this segment leaving the site disproportionately due to the modals, which leads to a loss of revenue.
At the same time there is a segment (usually much larger) that appreciates chatbots and FAQ modals - even on the first visit. Here these functionalities lead to a significant increase in sales.
I think that it is quite difficult to automatically assign the user to the appropriate segment and adjust the behavior of the website accordingly. Unfortunately.
Du such popups annoy me and I belong in the same segment as you? Absolutely. Am I an empiricist and do I have to advise most of my clients on such functionalities after appropriate tests because they boost sales? Also absolutely.
And on the question of GDPR modals, I'm afraid I have to say that they are an absolute legal necessity. Unfortunately, the way they have been implemented in most cases I know of is designed to put the user behind the scenes and make him accept more tracking/cookies than he would like to. These things annoy me so much and should be banned from the net.
I block cookies from all sites by default, and make exceptions for the few that I need to log into. The result is the GDPR modals keep popping up because the modals can't set cookies to remember whether or not I accepted.
So the only thing I can do is inject JS/CSS to block them.
(Also by de-modalizing it and hiding it, I never actually need to accept anything, and nobody gets my permission to track, hee hee.)
They absolutely are not a legal necessity if you don't do things you shouldn't be doing. That's the point of GDPR :).
But of course doing these things, putting up the popups, and then trying to direct users' anger at Brussels is empirically the revenue-maximizing strategy, so here we are.
Even then, too many sites replaced their point of contact with these trivial keyword kind of chat bot interfaces and it's annoying as heck.
I tried to report a phishing page hosted on some random SaaS thing yesterday. Instead of a contact form / abuse contact e-mail in the page footer I ended up on a FAQ page telling me to report it using their chat thing. Of course that chat was not staffed without any indication until you typed up a message (another frequent factor of annoyance for those not in US-adjacent time zones) and the keyword matcher asked me if the FAQ page I was on would be of any help. When I put the data in the thing to go on with my day it asked me for an e-mail to follow-up with me, something this interaction did not require.
Sure, I get when people get more customer interaction from these things but please folks, make sure it's not replacing functionality for other parts of your (potential) customer base.