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These chat messenger pop-ups can be quite annoying, the example on the site mentioned is typically 'in your face'. What's particularly frustrating with this on

by dazc 9y ago

These chat messenger pop-ups can be quite annoying, the example on the site mentioned is typically 'in your face'. What's particularly frustrating with this one is that there is already a prominent speech bubble icon in the corner of the screen that suggests they have a chat feature - if I want it. It doesn't need to crack open after a second and slap me. I am not defending the obvious misogyny here but I think an experiment that starts out by peeing off its subjects can not be fully objective?

codedokode 9y ago
They are absolutely inexcusable. Website developers should make simpler design rather than make everyone search for close button and consider every user an idiot. Also it can make user feel uncomfortable, as if there is someone behind their back standing and looking what they are doing with the site. This popup is also deceiving users. For example on the screenshot [1] we can see a human user thinking that a real person wrote a greeting to him and wasting time of his life replying to a bot. [1] https://i.imgur.com/yEtgHbr.png?1 https://i.imgur.com/yEtgHbr.png?1
- nitrogen 9y ago
  Also it can make user feel uncomfortable, as if there is someone behind their back standing and looking what they are doing with the site. You should check out Inspectlet.
  - codedokode 9y ago
    In this case they not only look, but also bother you with unneeded greetings. Like an annoying staff in a shop asking whether you need help.
    - salvar 9y ago
      > Like an annoying staff in a shop asking whether you need help. Would you call that a dark sales pattern?
      - TeMPOraL 9y ago
        Of course. They're not really asking if you need help, they're trying to interrupt your thinking and pressure you into making a buy decision on the spot.
        salvar 9y ago
        Fair enough. Should sales staff never ask anyone if they need assistance?
        dazc 9y ago
        I worked in a shop shortly after leaving school. Asking someone if they need assistance is almost certain to lead to one single action - the potential customer walking out of the shop at the next available opportunity.
  - jeffhuys 9y ago
    Or hotjar.
Flavius 9y ago
That and the target audience.
- T2_t2 9y ago
  Yeh, if it had been framed as "we dealt with Meme makers and low and behold, the 13-30 year old men that used it made lewd, crude and frankly misogynist comments!" would anyone have been surprised?
  - tclancy 9y ago
    How are so many people coming up with ways to dismiss this without confronting the fact nothing you put in quotes applied when the avatar was a man?
jenthoven 9y ago
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]
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  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 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 https://ello.co/ferdiz/post/p3wjs7hvw0zq-7qdrmyvea (Also submitted to HN a ways back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9574350 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.
  - dazc 9y ago
    '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?
psergeant 9y ago
> but I think an experiment that starts out by peeing off its subjects Nobody gave a shit when it was the dude or the cat. This whataboutism is absolutely mind-blowing to me.
endymi0n 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man The popup being annoying (to which I personally agree) doesn't change anything about the incredibly clear results. People are placed into all kinds of situations in which they come across as annoying by their employers (inbound tech support being just one example). The only long term solution is giving women the right to defend themselves in these kind of situations and not having to buckle down because of "business reasons". We've denied perfectly fine clients because they were fucking misogynists to our all-female sales team, but we're a dime in a dozen.
- Chris2048 9y ago
  If you read your own link, you'd find a strawman is refuting "an argument that was not presented by that opponent". Can you tell me how that applies to the post above?
yoavm 9y ago
I don't see how this is relevant in any way. I dislike these messenger ups too and finding them utterly annoying, but it's not an article about usability, UX or user engagement. It's about how men see and treat women online when using this specific tool, and I think it presents a huge educational problem of this (my) gender. As a man, I wouldn't never even think I have to hide my photo online. I've been using the internet for more than 20 years and was never harassed based on my sex (or anything else, really). I find it crucial that we understand these different experiences we're all facing when we go online, if we ever want it to be different. As far as I see it, this is about educating our boys much more than it is about educating our web designers.
- Double_a_92 9y ago
  When seeing an annoying popup with what seems to be a bot in it, people just happen to write shit in it. Even if it's just to annoy and waste time of that particular company.
  - Certhas 9y ago
    They don't. Not according to the article. Not if it's a neutral logo or an Asian guy. They only do so if it's a female face on there.
red_admiral 9y ago
This is basically an A/B test, admittedly on a moderate sample size but the point Julia is making is that the amount of abuse differed depending on the gender of the name and photo. All other variables, such as "annoyingness factor of having a pop-up chat box", were the same in all cases. Even if the abuse were partly caused by the chat box popping up annoyingly, one could still conclude that a chat box popping up with a woman's name and face annoys people more than with a man's or a generic "team" one.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
GordonS 9y ago
What I really hate is when they popup immediately upon visiting the site - I only just got here, I haven't even had a chance to read your spiel yet! I do find these real-time chat boxes useful, I just wish they'd stay discreetly in the bottom right corner so they're there when I actually want them :/
teekert 9y ago
The pissing off part was not a variable in this experiment, and it is your personal opinion. If the box is not intrusive I find it nice to be able to talk to a human directly. I does piss me off when I end up chatting to a dumb bot wasting my time though. In any case, perhaps it makes the conclusion even more shocking: A male can piss someone off with little to no negative effect, a female can't. I fear for the results when taking this experiment into meat space.
- guy98238710 9y ago
  The pissing off part might not be a variable in the experiment, but it still skews the results. You can get any result you want if you pick the right subset of the population and prep them the right way before taking the measurement.
Certhas 9y ago
Article: "Here is absolutely convincing evidence of the extreme sexism enabled by/encountered on the internet" Top comment: "Pop up chat boxes are really annoying. Also I don't know what objective means. But I have added a token: Not defending the sexism sentence."
- Sacho 9y ago
  How can you call this "absolutely convincing evidence"? The data is not available, the methodology is not disclosed, there's little discussion of confounding factors(server outage mentioned once)... I believe that sexual harassment is a serious problem women have to deal with, thanks to excellent studies like the one done by Pew on survey data in 2014(http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/online-harassment/ http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/online-harassment/). Calling this "absolutely convincing evidence" not only undermines your position(because it's easy to poke holes at it), but also diminishes the accomplishments of people who do put in the work to quantify and qualify harassment on the Internet.
  - Certhas 9y ago
    It's not evidence at the scientific level, but not far from it either. Raw data would be nice, but given the dramatic effect size reported I don't see it as absolutely crucial (it wouldn't be in a scientific context either). Also the methodology is described reasonably clearly (change the chat avatar and nothing else). Further the blog post even does discuss that this is not a scientific study, and what some of the possible confounders were. I'll concede that my statement is to general. But the article to me is strong evidence that the women involved experienced a strong sexist reaction from her customers. Are you not convinced that she did? The set up is as close to perfect for confounding variables as possible in an evolving production environment (as someone noted, it's basically A/B testing). I'm not saying it's convincing on its own in a vacuum of course. The prior formed by all the other studies (including the one you mentioned) is important in making it convincing. But it's certainly as clear evidence as 99% of what get's posted here. Put another way: If this was a blog post that shows that one configuration of a database leads to latencies consistently 10 times smaller than another configuration, with experiments run over three months of production use, I would call that convincing evidence. It's certainly a lot more coherent than the post I was replying to which somehow argues that this is not objective because chat boxes are annoying. (????) Luckily it's no longer the top comment either.

by dazc 9y ago

codedokode 9y ago

They are absolutely inexcusable. Website developers should make simpler design rather than make everyone search for close button and consider every user an idiot. Also it can make user feel uncomfortable, as if there is someone behind their back standing and looking what they are doing with the site. This popup is also deceiving users. For example on the screenshot [1] we can see a human user thinking that a real person wrote a greeting to him and wasting time of his life replying to a bot. [1] https://i.imgur.com/yEtgHbr.png?1 https://i.imgur.com/yEtgHbr.png?1

nitrogen 9y ago
Also it can make user feel uncomfortable, as if there is someone behind their back standing and looking what they are doing with the site. You should check out Inspectlet.
- codedokode 9y ago
  In this case they not only look, but also bother you with unneeded greetings. Like an annoying staff in a shop asking whether you need help.
  - salvar 9y ago
    > Like an annoying staff in a shop asking whether you need help. Would you call that a dark sales pattern?
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      Of course. They're not really asking if you need help, they're trying to interrupt your thinking and pressure you into making a buy decision on the spot.
      - salvar 9y ago
        Fair enough. Should sales staff never ask anyone if they need assistance?
        dazc 9y ago
        I worked in a shop shortly after leaving school. Asking someone if they need assistance is almost certain to lead to one single action - the potential customer walking out of the shop at the next available opportunity.
- jeffhuys 9y ago
  Or hotjar.

Flavius 9y ago

That and the target audience.

T2_t2 9y ago
Yeh, if it had been framed as "we dealt with Meme makers and low and behold, the 13-30 year old men that used it made lewd, crude and frankly misogynist comments!" would anyone have been surprised?
- tclancy 9y ago
  How are so many people coming up with ways to dismiss this without confronting the fact nothing you put in quotes applied when the avatar was a man?

jenthoven 9y ago

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]

dredmorbius 9y ago
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 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 https://ello.co/ferdiz/post/p3wjs7hvw0zq-7qdrmyvea (Also submitted to HN a ways back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9574350 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.
- dazc 9y ago
  '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?

psergeant 9y ago

> but I think an experiment that starts out by peeing off its subjects Nobody gave a shit when it was the dude or the cat. This whataboutism is absolutely mind-blowing to me.

endymi0n 9y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man The popup being annoying (to which I personally agree) doesn't change anything about the incredibly clear results. People are placed into all kinds of situations in which they come across as annoying by their employers (inbound tech support being just one example). The only long term solution is giving women the right to defend themselves in these kind of situations and not having to buckle down because of "business reasons". We've denied perfectly fine clients because they were fucking misogynists to our all-female sales team, but we're a dime in a dozen.

Chris2048 9y ago
If you read your own link, you'd find a strawman is refuting "an argument that was not presented by that opponent". Can you tell me how that applies to the post above?

yoavm 9y ago

I don't see how this is relevant in any way. I dislike these messenger ups too and finding them utterly annoying, but it's not an article about usability, UX or user engagement. It's about how men see and treat women online when using this specific tool, and I think it presents a huge educational problem of this (my) gender. As a man, I wouldn't never even think I have to hide my photo online. I've been using the internet for more than 20 years and was never harassed based on my sex (or anything else, really). I find it crucial that we understand these different experiences we're all facing when we go online, if we ever want it to be different. As far as I see it, this is about educating our boys much more than it is about educating our web designers.

Double_a_92 9y ago
When seeing an annoying popup with what seems to be a bot in it, people just happen to write shit in it. Even if it's just to annoy and waste time of that particular company.
- Certhas 9y ago
  They don't. Not according to the article. Not if it's a neutral logo or an Asian guy. They only do so if it's a female face on there.

red_admiral 9y ago

This is basically an A/B test, admittedly on a moderate sample size but the point Julia is making is that the amount of abuse differed depending on the gender of the name and photo. All other variables, such as "annoyingness factor of having a pop-up chat box", were the same in all cases. Even if the abuse were partly caused by the chat box popping up annoyingly, one could still conclude that a chat box popping up with a woman's name and face annoys people more than with a man's or a generic "team" one.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

GordonS 9y ago

What I really hate is when they popup immediately upon visiting the site - I only just got here, I haven't even had a chance to read your spiel yet! I do find these real-time chat boxes useful, I just wish they'd stay discreetly in the bottom right corner so they're there when I actually want them :/

teekert 9y ago

The pissing off part was not a variable in this experiment, and it is your personal opinion. If the box is not intrusive I find it nice to be able to talk to a human directly. I does piss me off when I end up chatting to a dumb bot wasting my time though. In any case, perhaps it makes the conclusion even more shocking: A male can piss someone off with little to no negative effect, a female can't. I fear for the results when taking this experiment into meat space.

guy98238710 9y ago
The pissing off part might not be a variable in the experiment, but it still skews the results. You can get any result you want if you pick the right subset of the population and prep them the right way before taking the measurement.

Certhas 9y ago

Article: "Here is absolutely convincing evidence of the extreme sexism enabled by/encountered on the internet" Top comment: "Pop up chat boxes are really annoying. Also I don't know what objective means. But I have added a token: Not defending the sexism sentence."

Sacho 9y ago
How can you call this "absolutely convincing evidence"? The data is not available, the methodology is not disclosed, there's little discussion of confounding factors(server outage mentioned once)... I believe that sexual harassment is a serious problem women have to deal with, thanks to excellent studies like the one done by Pew on survey data in 2014(http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/online-harassment/ http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/online-harassment/). Calling this "absolutely convincing evidence" not only undermines your position(because it's easy to poke holes at it), but also diminishes the accomplishments of people who do put in the work to quantify and qualify harassment on the Internet.
- Certhas 9y ago
  It's not evidence at the scientific level, but not far from it either. Raw data would be nice, but given the dramatic effect size reported I don't see it as absolutely crucial (it wouldn't be in a scientific context either). Also the methodology is described reasonably clearly (change the chat avatar and nothing else). Further the blog post even does discuss that this is not a scientific study, and what some of the possible confounders were. I'll concede that my statement is to general. But the article to me is strong evidence that the women involved experienced a strong sexist reaction from her customers. Are you not convinced that she did? The set up is as close to perfect for confounding variables as possible in an evolving production environment (as someone noted, it's basically A/B testing). I'm not saying it's convincing on its own in a vacuum of course. The prior formed by all the other studies (including the one you mentioned) is important in making it convincing. But it's certainly as clear evidence as 99% of what get's posted here. Put another way: If this was a blog post that shows that one configuration of a database leads to latencies consistently 10 times smaller than another configuration, with experiments run over three months of production use, I would call that convincing evidence. It's certainly a lot more coherent than the post I was replying to which somehow argues that this is not objective because chat boxes are annoying. (????) Luckily it's no longer the top comment either.