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Chat Bubble Blindness
- techsin101 6y agobetween chat popup, cookie notice, notification confirmation, email subscription box... there is very little left to imagination then that this website is obviously on drugs
- thecupisblue 6y agoAnd with segment, hotjar, google analytics, heap analytic. Jesus, how much analytics do y'all need.
- techsin101 6y agobut MORE DATA
- gcatalfamo 6y agoAm 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
- TheAdamAndChe 6y agoI 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.
- raverbashing 6y agoAgree 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")
- jrs235 6y agoFake chatbot popup: "Hello and welcome, my name is Maria. How can I help you?" Me: "Go away."
- csmattryder 6y agoAs 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.
- jackfrodo 6y agoThose 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.
- Trasmatta 6y agoIt'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?
- antasvara 6y agoSpeaking 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.
- eloisant 6y agoit's like online ads, if they manage to upsale to 5% customers it's still a huge win.
- CathedralBorrow 6y agoDo you do a bit of research on your purchase before heading into a store? If yes, then that might be a big reason.
- watertom 6y agoCar dealerships are the worst. Every. Damn. Page. Has. One. And. No. Matter. How. Many. Times. You. Decline. The. Bubble. Keeps. Popping. Up.
- Uninen 6y agoYou 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.
- jerf 6y agoI 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.
- ogre_codes 6y agoIt'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.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jrochkind1 6y agoGiven the entire point of the OP, you are clearly not the only one, right?
- markosaric 6y agoSame 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.
- hnick 6y agoOnce 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.
- dbbk 6y agoThere'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.
- steve-benjamins 6y agoHey I'm the OP— we give more of the story here: https://www.atlistmaps.com/in-good-company/chat-bubble-blindness https://www.atlistmaps.com/in-good-company/chat-bubble-blind... Sorry. I didn't submit this!
- draw_down 6y agoThat thing is a nuisance, a terrible idea. People should really cut it out with that thing.
- nicoburns 6y agoThis 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.
- karldanninger 6y agoYou'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)
- cutemonster 6y agoYou can write a script: "I'm a real person" and save time
- owenversteeg 6y agoI 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?
- rsa25519 6y ago> 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.
- steve-benjamins 6y agoHey 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24060501 Sorry OP— just thought I'd point that out :)
- pbronez 6y agoThis thread should be updated to point to this link
- rocqua 6y agoNormally dang (HN moderator) is willing to fix links to make things better. Should probably work here as well.
- steve-benjamins 6y agoIs there any way to get his attention for this? That would be amazing...
- detaro 6y agoemail him. contact link is in the footer.
- steve-benjamins 6y agoAwesome. Just did. Thank you!!
- jonnydubowsky 6y agoJust 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-algorithms-47syg https://www.stevebenjamins.com/blog/music-in-the-age-of-algo...
- dang 6y agoChanged now.
- rezic 6y agoI 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.
- mojuba 6y agoI 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.)
- joncalhoun 6y agoThe 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.
- conductr 6y agoI 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.
- salusinarduis 6y agoWhy not just remove it with inspect element?
- peacefulhat 6y agoBecause fuck intrusive sales. Shouldn’t need developer tools to buy a product.
- ta17711771 6y ago
- dariusj18 6y agoI 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.
- cutemonster 6y agoI 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 @
- dariusj18 6y agoYeah, there are certainly antipatterns that are in use for customer support.
- j45 6y agoI 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.
- monkeydust 6y agoPersonally 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...
- mtlynch 6y agoIn 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.
- dbbk 6y agoI don't think this is statistically significant.
- steve-benjamins 6y agoHi, I'm the author— this is 98% confidence.
- pottertheotter 6y agoI 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.
- zamalek 6y agoYou'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.
- bcx 6y agoI 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 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.
- thomas 6y agoJust 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.
- dawnerd 6y agoIntercom 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.
- peacefulhat 6y agoI leave the site immediately if there’s intercom integration or similar.
- dbbk 6y agoThis seems like quite an overreaction.
- peacefulhat 6y agoRip it out of your site. I hate it.
- dbbk 6y agoRegardless 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.
- peacefulhat 6y agoThe whole premise of this thread is that it is not effective. Your tone is like it's my problem. It's their problem.
- SubiculumCode 6y agoI 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.
- mindhash 6y agoSomeone 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.
- ofou 6y agoThe 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.
- ape4 6y agoOn the other hand its a standard UI element that everyone knows. Of course, its often abused.
- jabroni_salad 6y agoI 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.
- drivebycomment 6y agoIf 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.
- steve-benjamins 6y agoGood luck AB testing things in the real world :p
- drivebycomment 6y agoIndeed. 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.
- renewiltord 6y agoNo, 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.
- gumby 6y agoAn 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.
- ksaj 6y agoI 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.
- ideal_stingray 6y agoI 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.
- hapless 6y agoI would never have known what this button did.
- chmod775 6y agoSome 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.
- aogl 6y agoI 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!
- golergka 6y ago> it just seemed like the startup thing to do This motivation sounds like a recipe for disaster.
- tehabe 6y agoI 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.
- Yizahi 6y agoIn 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
- smeyer 6y ago>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.
- noahtallen 6y agoAlmost 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.
- mderazon 6y agoTwitter seems to work pretty well for me as well
- noahtallen 6y agoI 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.
- stmw 6y agoIt 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.
- yarone 6y agoI 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.
- LeoPanthera 6y agoI see that circle thing all the time but I had no idea what it did until this moment.
- projektfu 6y agoIt reminds me of the Lolwut pear more than anything else.
- birken 6y agoJust 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.
- conradludgate 6y agoIt doesn't look like they A/B tested. More likely just switched to it 100%
- antipaul 6y agoEven more of a problem for interpretation of these results...
- aasasd 6y agoAlright I guess — but as an aside, disabling keyboard scrolling on the page is a really weird design decision.
- karldanninger 6y agoCan you elaborate? Edit: I see now, that is not intentional.
- jtth 6y agoThis relative percentage stuff is silly.
- t0mmyb0y 6y agoChat buttons allow us to troll websites that have no idea what they are doing- most of them.
- egypturnash 6y agogod 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/ http://mrclay.org/2006/04/23/mypage-bookmarklet/) to get rid of particularly annoying ones.
- rishi 6y agoI 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.
- l0b0 6y agoI 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.
- torgoguys 6y agoI 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.
- StavrosK 6y agouBlock Origin and/or Privacy Badger block Intercom. I suspect it's not chat bubble blindness, it's chat bubble blocklist.
- mleonhard 6y agoTheir A/B testing results are most likely due to chance. Using the technique from https://www.evanmiller.org/sequential-ab-testing.html 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.
- thephyber 6y agoGood 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.
- poopsmithe 6y agoI don't think the issue is chat bubble blindness. I think the issue is material design floating action button blindness.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hrishios 6y agoSome 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.