4 ms·

A nice story but gotta say that olark tab that keeps rising up from the bottom on every single page drives me absolutely nuts.

• bcx 12y ago
  Assuming the tab is going to be there, what would make it be less distracting to you? When we first started all this we wanted to get rid of those incredibly annoying people wearing headsets bouncing around the screen. (I think we've made progress). (Some themes are animated others aren't, perhaps if we had more people use non animated themes by default, it'd help)
  • grey-area 12y ago
    If you must have a tab, it should have a big dismiss button for the 90% of visitors who are not interested. Why is there no option to close it? Another option would be not to have a tab at all (a hovering tab is very annoying as it hides content and distracts from the site for a function which is not often used) - instead let customers include an unobtrusive help button in their actual page content wherever they wish which calls your js in order to display your overlay when clicked. You don't need an obnoxious tab.
    • bcx 12y ago
      Site owners actually have the option to make it close able, and implement with just a simple "help" button. I think what generally happens is that the team that handles customer communication does not have the dev resources to get someone to add UI elements to their page, so only bigger companies take advantage of "closeable olark" and click to open the chat window. We also found that once people close the window, many get confused and have a hard time opening it again. (clearly not a problem for the "average HN reader", who might clear cookies and reload)
  • tonglil 12y ago
    One of the most annoying thing is the number of other requests Olark makes on a page. Or that you can't just hide it away permanently/30 days whatever because I'm not going to be using it on this site.
    • bcx 12y ago
      Let's say we wanted to give power users a way to hide the chat window, and have it come back when they wanted? How would you want it to work? (i.e. we could do like, if query string contains hide-olark-for-30-days, we could just hide it for you, and if you wanted it back, we could give you an API command you could type into dev tools? Our biggest concern (and we do allow hide-able chat boxes, is that once it's gone, many visitors actually want it back in the future on unpredictable intervals. So you can't just simple say "hide for 30 days")
  • pbreit 12y ago
    How about sliding up once on the first page visited and then on subsequent pages just have it display. It's the sliding up on every single page that is so distracting (perhaps that's the intent).
• ux-app 12y ago
  This also drives me crazy. I find it terribly distracting. I wanted to integrate Olark into my saas app in the past, but, if I'm not mistaken, it seems that the tab widget is the only way to go. This was a non starter for me as it would obscure part of my UI.
  • vertex-four 12y ago
    It looks like you can load Olark into any DOM element[0] now - perhaps that'd help? [0] https://www.olark.com/api#box.inline https://www.olark.com/api#box.inline