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I thought like you in the past. I only installed the Crisp chatbox (with no popup) on my SaaS and was very surprised with the results: I got more contact from u

I thought like you in the past. I only installed the Crisp chatbox (with no popup) on my SaaS and was very surprised with the results: I got more contact from users through it than through Email or Telegram. I got a lot of feedback and was able to help many potential customers. 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.

dheera 6y ago
Sure, I love chat support interfaces and use them all the time. If I want support, that is. But not when I hit your site for the first time and just getting acquainted with your product. I just want to see your product materials at my own pace in peace. If you want me to see something different, change those materials to whatever you want your first impression to be. But don't accost me with a "can i help you" before I have even had 2 minutes to read your product description. That's almost like if a grocery store employee greets you at the door and follows you around as you browse the fruit section asking "can I help you" -- I'd probably leave that grocery store pretty quickly. 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.
- Semaphor 6y ago
  > There should NEVER be any unsolicited modals […] GDPR warnings 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.
  - dheera 6y ago
    No, I just block cookies from ALL sites except the few that I need to log into. GDPR is mostly irrelevant to me for that reason. 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!
    - account42 6y ago
      > No, I just block cookies from ALL sites except the few that I need to log into. GDPR is mostly irrelevant to me for that reason. GDPR is about all tracking - cookies are just one implementation.
      - robin_reala 6y ago
        GDPR is about all processing and use of personal data, not just tracking.
    - tpxl 6y ago
      >No, I just block cookies from ALL sites except the few that I need to log into. GDPR is mostly irrelevant to me for that reason. 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).
      - dheera 6y ago
        > Unfortunately they probably treat this as if you accepted Sure, but they can't track me anyway :)
        6y ago
- alias_neo 6y ago
  The experience is analogous to the situation of walking into a physical store and having the clerk harass you the second you walk in. It makes you very uncomfortable and doesn't give you the opportunity to browse before they jump on you. 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?
  - vidarh 6y ago
    I often walk out of stores when that happen, and have more than once stopped to tell them that is exactly why I'm leaving.
- sdoering 6y ago
  As a data analyst I have evaluated the performance of chatbots in particular and modals in general for several clients. 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.
  - dheera 6y ago
    > And on the question of GDPR modals, I'm afraid I have to say that they are an absolute legal necessity. 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.)
    - nicbou 6y ago
      uBlock has a list for cookie modal. It's pretty effective. I Don't Care About Cookies is also great.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    > And on the question of GDPR modals, I'm afraid I have to say that they are an absolute legal necessity. 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.
- tastroder 6y ago
  > If I want support, that is. 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.
vertis 6y ago
I find those chat boxes to be completely irritating. Doubly so if it doesn't go straight to a human, there are ones that want to shove you through the crappy zendesk "are you sure this helpdesk article doesn't answer your question" flow. 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.
- ben_w 6y ago
  > I find those chat boxes to be completely irritating. The supermajority here does, or so I would guess. We aren’t representative, and that’s important to remember when designing user interfaces.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    "Non-representativeness" is overused; we voluntarily take away our own voice about UX, and then complain that it sucks. 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.
  - vertis 6y ago
    There is a chance of survivorship bias. You get a bunch of messages through the chat interface and all of a sudden you believe it adds value, when in reality you're potentially annoying a whole bunch of users that aren't necessarily telling you that they're annoyed. 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. [1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
mrkwse 6y ago
> As developers who never need help, we tend to forget that some people might do 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.
- partyboat1586 6y ago
  Which neruological condition(s) cause sensitivity to popup animations? Not questioning the validity of the claim just interested to learn more.
  - mrkwse 6y ago
    I haven't been able to find anything specifically around popup animations, but the BBC's Cape initiative discusses some of the stimulations etc. that can be intrusive for those with neurodivergent conditions such as autism spectrum condition, ADHD, etc. 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. Cape: https://bbc.github.io/uxd-cognitive/ https://bbc.github.io/uxd-cognitive/
    - owlie 6y ago
      (Off-topic tangent here, sorry.) 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?
      - mrkwse 6y ago
        I believe it is to try and avoid negative connotations. Not quite sure how widespread it is, but the BBC do try to be very conscious of their language in such contexts, and I think do a very good job of it.

dheera 6y ago

Sure, I love chat support interfaces and use them all the time. If I want support, that is. But not when I hit your site for the first time and just getting acquainted with your product. I just want to see your product materials at my own pace in peace. If you want me to see something different, change those materials to whatever you want your first impression to be. But don't accost me with a "can i help you" before I have even had 2 minutes to read your product description. That's almost like if a grocery store employee greets you at the door and follows you around as you browse the fruit section asking "can I help you" -- I'd probably leave that grocery store pretty quickly. 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.

Semaphor 6y ago
> There should NEVER be any unsolicited modals […] GDPR warnings 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.
- dheera 6y ago
  No, I just block cookies from ALL sites except the few that I need to log into. GDPR is mostly irrelevant to me for that reason. 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!
  - account42 6y ago
    > No, I just block cookies from ALL sites except the few that I need to log into. GDPR is mostly irrelevant to me for that reason. GDPR is about all tracking - cookies are just one implementation.
    - robin_reala 6y ago
      GDPR is about all processing and use of personal data, not just tracking.
  - tpxl 6y ago
    >No, I just block cookies from ALL sites except the few that I need to log into. GDPR is mostly irrelevant to me for that reason. 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).
    - dheera 6y ago
      > Unfortunately they probably treat this as if you accepted Sure, but they can't track me anyway :)
      - 6y ago
alias_neo 6y ago
The experience is analogous to the situation of walking into a physical store and having the clerk harass you the second you walk in. It makes you very uncomfortable and doesn't give you the opportunity to browse before they jump on you. 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?
- vidarh 6y ago
  I often walk out of stores when that happen, and have more than once stopped to tell them that is exactly why I'm leaving.
sdoering 6y ago
As a data analyst I have evaluated the performance of chatbots in particular and modals in general for several clients. 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.
- dheera 6y ago
  > And on the question of GDPR modals, I'm afraid I have to say that they are an absolute legal necessity. 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.)
  - nicbou 6y ago
    uBlock has a list for cookie modal. It's pretty effective. I Don't Care About Cookies is also great.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > And on the question of GDPR modals, I'm afraid I have to say that they are an absolute legal necessity. 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.
tastroder 6y ago
> If I want support, that is. 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.

vertis 6y ago

I find those chat boxes to be completely irritating. Doubly so if it doesn't go straight to a human, there are ones that want to shove you through the crappy zendesk "are you sure this helpdesk article doesn't answer your question" flow. 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.

ben_w 6y ago
> I find those chat boxes to be completely irritating. The supermajority here does, or so I would guess. We aren’t representative, and that’s important to remember when designing user interfaces.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  "Non-representativeness" is overused; we voluntarily take away our own voice about UX, and then complain that it sucks. 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.
- vertis 6y ago
  There is a chance of survivorship bias. You get a bunch of messages through the chat interface and all of a sudden you believe it adds value, when in reality you're potentially annoying a whole bunch of users that aren't necessarily telling you that they're annoyed. 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. [1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

mrkwse 6y ago

> As developers who never need help, we tend to forget that some people might do 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.

partyboat1586 6y ago
Which neruological condition(s) cause sensitivity to popup animations? Not questioning the validity of the claim just interested to learn more.
- mrkwse 6y ago
  I haven't been able to find anything specifically around popup animations, but the BBC's Cape initiative discusses some of the stimulations etc. that can be intrusive for those with neurodivergent conditions such as autism spectrum condition, ADHD, etc. 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. Cape: https://bbc.github.io/uxd-cognitive/ https://bbc.github.io/uxd-cognitive/
  - owlie 6y ago
    (Off-topic tangent here, sorry.) 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?
    - mrkwse 6y ago
      I believe it is to try and avoid negative connotations. Not quite sure how widespread it is, but the BBC do try to be very conscious of their language in such contexts, and I think do a very good job of it.