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Comment by sbarre | Hacker News Reader

While this may be handy for the CSR, I could see this leading to unpleasantly surprised users if the CSR references something they typed but didn't send.

From a technical perspective this is neat, but from a user experience perspective, I wonder how they surface the fact that this is happening?

I would suspect that lots of people refine a post box's content before hitting send, without really expecting anyone to be watching what they do..

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The goal is to give customers tools they can use responsibly, and allow them exercise judgement. This is obviously the leading edge and we thought long and hard before enabling the functionality. One idea we have towards making visitors more comfortable with this would be to create a notification that enables visitors to see that what they're typing can be seen? Hopefully customer feedback helps us figure out which direction to go here.

EDIT: After getting feedback from some customers, we're building in an optout so that users

a. know that what they're typing can be seen, and b. can opt out of their typing being seen at all.

If you want users to know what they are typing is sent, then echo it into the window above. That's a strong yet non-intrusive way to let them know the data is being sent.

I think the benefits of the system are A: faster response times by reading as they type and B: reading drafts of what people type, to understand them better.

No, it isn't innovation. People have thought of this and dismissed it because it's unethical. Your optout won't solve this in a way that doesn't clutter the UI. And even if it is fairly loud, not everyone will read it. You'll need a clickthrough.

Hi Ben - thanks for the feedback (also responded to you on twitter). We've disabled the feature as of now and we'll only roll it out again once we can give visitors clear and easy options to know what's being seen, and opt out as well.

I think this is the responsible approach. Someone else made the important point that "if I choose not to send something, respect my choice".

I commend you guys for trying something new and working to make your product better, but even more now for realizing you need to think this through a bit more..

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