I 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.
As 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.
Those 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.
It'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?
Speaking 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.
I'm sure it works for conversions of people already there. I do wonder how it affects traffic long-term because the store feels annoying. That's harder to measure.
Ha, that's actually no longer the case. Stores like Best Buy do track foot traffic and it's accounted for in KPIs. My manager would have us enter and leave around the security sensors so we wouldn't inflate that number.
This is an American disease. In most European countries staff might great you, but they will try to discreetly shadow you and once you act like you need a help they will step in to assist.
I absolutely hated the US diners with multiple 'are you ok? do you need anything?' interruptions during single meal. I know why it happens, I just find it really annoying.
It’s not just annoying but they EXPECT you to stop whatever conversation you’re talking, at ANY moment, like they’re the pre emptive multitasking kernel. And then proceed to offer “specials” well into the meal. Dude I don’t know you. You want a good tip? I would rather use an app to order whatever I need. I came to talk to a friend, family member or about a business deal. There is a time to interrupt and that’s ONCE, when you’re taking the order, and then when you’re bringing food MAYBE.
I would LOVE to have a restaurant where I can order from my phone at the table, signal waiters etc. And get a notification when food is ready so we can both choose when they will bring it out.
There’s a Japanese restaurant in Boulder, CO that does something similar. There’s a little cube shaped dongle on the table and depending on the orientation it notifies the server of “I’m ready to order”, “Table service needed”, “check please”, etc. It worked surprising well.
America is way behind the curve here. It's typical for a South Korean restaurant to have a button on the table. The staff will only come over if you press the button.
I was at a restaurant where each table had a QR code printed on it, containing the URL of a webpage where you could order food and drinks for that table. I was there with some friends who didn't notice the QR code. They were quite confused when the waiter came over to give them menus and me my first drink. :)
all the restaurants in LA's koreatown (and little tokyo, incidentally, because many are korean-owned) have those buttons too.
i'm of mixed opinion--it's good when you want to be left alone to chat with your tablemates, but when you need lots of service, it can be annoying (and make you a little self-conscious). the nice thing is that you can usually still just flag down one of the usually abundant servers (back before lockdown).
Actually, many chain restaurants in the US (Chili's, TGIFridays, etc.) now have a tablet at the table. You can do things like order drinks, dessert, etc. without flagging someone down. You can pay with credit cards. There are games for bored kids to play (for a fee, usually, though). I found it rather annoying because of course it has to advertise throughout your whole meal. Luckily there's no sound, but it displays other things you could be ordering. But it is really convenient for getting service more quickly and checking out without hassle.
I feel like those are way over-engineered though. I don't need a whole tablet with games and videos of the specials and the full menu. I just need the equivalent of a flight attendant button. That's it.
Every time I go to a restaurant with one of these ad tablets, I just turn it so that it’s facing away from the rest of the table. I can use it when I want to pay or something, but I don’t have to see all the ads.
I forget the name, but when I was in college there was a Mexican buffet chain that had a flag on the table if you needed refills, etc. I used to go there with my friends and the flag went up 5 minutes in and never came down.
We ate a lot then. Me and my friends were the terrors of buffet lines all across town ...
Thanks to Covid, I have been to multiple restaurants where you are assigned a table number and order from your phone (generally via the app they already have set up for take out). It’s not as good as Michelin star service, but it’s way better than bad service. And you never have to wait for a check.
> In most European countries staff might great you, but they will try to discreetly shadow you and once you act like you need a help they will step in to assist.
This is even worse (to me) because most of the time there's nothing discreet about it.
I'd rather have someone ask up front if I need help - at which point I can politely say no - than just follow me around the store, silently watching, like a hyena stalking a wounded gazelle.
He's being a bit hyperbolic. As I'm also European, I can tell you employees are off doing their own thing. If you do need help, you have to go find one.
In my experience, this is a global phenomenon that's probably driven more by management philosophy than by geography. It's endemic to e.g. luxury retailers and trickles down from there.
The other nice thing about being asked up front is the ability to say yes, but I will ask for help when I need it. The staff are usually much easier to find when you do have a question or need something to be retrieved, yet you don't have to deal with them if you don't need them.
Maybe a bit harsh, but it's still really interesting. I'm super glad some American supermarkets now have self-checkouts, and will use them where I can. Not only are the cashiers often unreasonably cheerful, but having someone bagging your stuff feels super weird. To be fair, it's possible having a bagger (?) is more efficient, because it increases throughput. But it still creeps me out to stand there passively doing fuck-all.
Maybe chat bubbles are similar? Taking away someone's initiative might work well for things they don't want to do, but for people who know what they want or just doing research, it doesn't seem like a good plan.
I work in Grocery IT. We generally assume you have to have two self checkouts in order to meet the customer/item throughput of one staffed checkout. And even then, I'd tend to put my money on the staffed checkout.
Some of it is just the limitations of a SCO, in that store staff don't have to wait for each item to be weighed by the lane before moving to the next item, but a lot of is that most people are not nearly as fast as they think they are.
A lot of it depends on how hands-on the staff manning the SCOs are as well. The Costco near me implemented SCOs in the past year, but those might as well be full checkouts with the number of staff that are around them looking to help out.
Part of the problem is that the self checkouts are super paranoid about preventing theft. If you put your bag on the output you get in trouble, your child puts their hand on the scale you need cashier assistance, you don't wait long enough after the last item for it to be weighed and you need to start . It's literally impossible to go fast! I don't know if it is justified. But it seems surprising as I could easily just put something in my bag if I wanted to steal it, I don't know why I would bother putting it into the scale.
Of course the cashier will always be faster, they are familiar with the interface, know where most of the barcodes are and have the codes of most non-barcoded items memorized.
But self-checkout could be much faster by removing some anti-features (from the customer POV). I have seen a couple of stores with a better solution where you pick up a scanner at the start and scan your items as you go. This has the advantage of parallelizing most of the process instead of clogging up on big expensive machines. In fact with the ability to check out on that device you could probably get by with just a "Customer Service" desk for when something goes wrong.
In the Netherlands, self-checkout doesn't use scales. I simply scan all the items in my basket, and put them in my backpack immediately. Once in a while, you are flagged, and a sample of your items are scanned to make the probability low that you are stealing something. Scanning the loyalty card helps to prevent too many checks over time.
All in all, the total overhead next to scanning your items is a mere few seconds.
This is a huge contrast with my experience in the UK. Those scanners are talking, are slow to move between states, require you to put everything from one to another scale. This is indeed often slower than a human worker, and amazes me to no end.
That sounds way better, and quite possibly more effective at actually catching shoplifting. My experience in the UK, Ireland US and Canada has been the bad example as you have described.
It seems to be a classic case of bureaucratic risk aversion without proper cost analysis.
I much prefer self-checkouts because of the forced conversations cashiers are forced to have and cashiers just being bad at bagging, but they really do slow down the process. The scanner locks for a couple seconds after an item is scanned (even if there is no weight check or other delay screen), presumably to prevent double scanning for slower customers, but it just becomes a giant PITA when I have small items I could scan and toss into my bag in 10 seconds if they'd just remove the delay and it ends up being closer to a minute since it'll probably pause to reweigh a couple times in addition to the normal delay.
I avoid self-checkout at most stores because of this. Just too much a pain in the butt, never mind if I have a lot of items and they can't even fit in the baggage area!
Walmart has this figured out. You just scan the item. Done. No scales, no anti-theft I can tell aside from a person watching.
I remember Food 4 Less back in the day (maybe twenty years ago) having a sort of hybrid system where the cashier scanned your items and rang then up, but you bagged your own groceries.
Are you familiar with any similar systems today? How do they rate on throughput?
Any grocery store that’s understaffed/busy ATM. As awesome as H-E-B is, I’ve had to bag my own stuff once in a while. It usually feels a bit rushed and seems to annoy the checker if you’re not super-quick about it.
This is the it's always been done in Sweden. With space for two different customers to bag per cashier. A metal divider is put diagonally on the conveyor belt to feed items either left or right.
The 'metal divider, self bag' is a discount / bulk store I go to. Old-style 'casher + bagger' is another. And I've gone to stores with self-checkout, both with and without scales in them.
Seems quite varied here, with of course that variance mostly along franchise lines...
I only use self checkout in a pinch, in large part as an act of Luddism. Self checkouts take away entry level work. I have a choice to support the workers, so I take it. Not to mention how awful the interfaces are when you're buying fresh veg -- I find that it's usually faster to wait for an available checker. In a lot of grocery stores near me, I do my own bagging and some even have a second conveyer for that purpose.
If you want to support the workers and actually make a difference in someone’s life, get someone to take your bags to your car and tip that person. They get to take a break and walk outside, and make some extra cash under the table.
I don’t think opting-out of self checkout counts as “supporting the workers”.
The more that people use self checkout, the fewer employees the store can get away with. Opting out slows the process of automating jobs away.
As for my car... most often I'm either by transit or walking. Anyway, I could be wrong but I don't think stores offer help out where I live. I've never heard it in the decade that I've lived here.
And I absolutely love the extra care and attention. Dining out in other countries can be a complete hassle as you wait for the waiter to show up... whenever he feels like.
I think some believe this was the reason why Wal-Mart failed in Germany. They brought this "can I help you" with them and German customers rather went to Aldi & co where they could shop in peace.
Walmart? Are you sure? They are not known for being helpful, let alone solicitous.
Ironically, the only grocery chain that I can think of where employees actively ask if they can help is Trader Joe's. I can't help but giggle at the fact that they're German-owned, even if this part of the culture came from the American founder.
I read an analysis about Wal-Mart it was mentioned that employees are required to ask every customer within 3 feet. Maybe that has changed in the last 16 years.
Oh I would also be very confused since Aldi is the pioneer when it comes to shopping in peace and w/o frills in Germany.
You 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.
It'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.
There'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.
This 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.
You'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)
I 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?
> 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.
Thanks Steve - no need to say sorry. I was keen to post this as chat bubbles have been grating on me for some time and I am glad someone did some analysis on it!
I 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.
I 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.)
I 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.
That was actually my line of thinking. I was on mobile and it didn’t work. I jumped onto my laptop and still didn’t work. I felt I had put in enough effort at that point. If I didn’t have what I felt was a fairly perfect substitute in the competitors product maybe I would have tried harder.
That requires multiple clicks to 'fix' someone else's website. There should be a more automated (but still suboptimal) solution where you can add Intercom to your ad blocker though.
There was an article yesterday about the lack of increased web page performance to match the constantly growing infrastructure - one item that came up was the fact that many sites have unnecessary features that no one asked for. This quote:
> We first added Intercom when we launched Atlist— it just seemed like the startup thing to do.
Seems like a perfect example of a feature that wasn't born out of demand or a perceived demand - it was just one of the bells and whistles available as freebies in frameworks so why not throw it in there.
Isn't it weird that we have entire companies like Intercom or Rasa whose value add is pushing automated, AI-driven "assistants" onto websites, and then the companies that buy into that entire value add and codebases hacked on by ML experts find that none of it even works better than how it was in 1998?
I could understand the thought process at first glance. NLP is revolutionizing things. Startups want the lastest technology if it's backed by Arxiv papers underneath enough layers. There is the image of people working dead-end jobs in call centers answering questions that nobody wants to spend time on but need to get answered anyways. So why not just make all of that go away, by inserting this ready-made digital replacement into your package.json?
I feel like the point is being missed though. Because even a call center employee working at Comcast is still a human. I think people are getting way too ahead of themselves in thinking code and "neural" networks (what a misleading term) can suddenly automate all of these things that could never be automated before, like dynamic conversations. And even before that the article proves that a single HTML form element is 62% more effective than a VC-backed GPT2-powered "solution" to a problem nobody had. Why require a dynamic conversation at all if e-mail works better?
Maybe there's some property about human interaction with founders or call center workers that's fundamentally impossible to replicate with technology, at the philosophical level, and we'd be better off investing into human resources instead of spending all of this engineering effort trying to work around that fact. Or maybe there theoretically isn't such a limitation, but I have serious doubts that 2020 is the year we'd finally be ready to declare that we've gotten past them.
While intercom's advertising may like to tout bots and AI chat, I can't imagine that is why most companies use it. They have a plethora of other features, sort of like proactive marketing automation that make it useful.
If it were just about the chat we would have dropped them for a cheaper solution long ago.
They continue to roll out new features and charge more and more for them though, so they will eventually run us off. Just not yet.
It's unfortunate because AI in its current form has properties that would be amazing for human labor augmentation, but I would argue that the kind of AI system you can get for less than $10 million/1-2 years development time is not really well suited to replace a human agent.
The ML sprinkled over MS Office, Facebook's image tagging interface, GMail are often very useful to me, but I can't see anyone finding the suggestions so reliable they would be comfortable letting the systems silently work without guiding the process and approving changes.
It's good to have someone keeping an eye on the customer interactions. If you have such a deluge of support requests that this is a problem, maybe the actual solution is a simpler process or better communication up front.
I see this issue a lot with social media, everyone wants to have share buttons and so on, but few step back and think about if that even makes sense and if their customers even want to engage with them in that way.
There's a perceived need for a Facebook page or Twitter, but how much value does it really add to either party. Especially in commerce where conversion correlates with speed, is it really worth paying that performance cost? As an example, last week I removed a bunch of integrations for a client that were adding no value and adding roughly 1.5s to First Contentful Paint.
Though as a strategy, it sometimes pays off to hurt your competitors by focusing them on features that are useless or cost them money.
I have used them as a business owner of an e-commerce shop and they were surprisingly useful for our customers. I was reluctant to add one to the site but it was absolutely worth it. I did always wish that there was a way to integrate the chat window in to the page layout, though - I think that would be much less obnoxious than the chat bubble pop-up. I started trying to build one like that but never finished.
Personally 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...
In 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.
I 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.
You'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.
How much data would you need for confidence? According to my calculations this is 98% confidence. That feels like 'enough' to make a decision for my small startup.
I'm pretty explicit in the blog post that this isn't meant to be universally applicable— it's just what happened to us.
First of all, kudos for quantifying your results instead of hand waving them. Yes, your results look like a ~60% improvement in conversion rate from the A to the B test, with a p value of 0.02 and a statistical power of around 80% for a two-tailed test. So that's good.
However context is important - at this level of significance you'd expect to see a similarly strong, but ultimately spurious, effect going from the A to the B test about 1 in 50 times.
Since you're not working on something safety critical, that's probably an acceptable false positive rate for you. But generally speaking, and in particular here since the absolute numbers and changes are quite small, I would be wary of trusting such a result. It seems promising but inconclusive. Maybe run a few more tests with disjoint (or nearly so) samples of visitors?
There are a few other things that could possibly confound the result - off the top of my head, your screenshots look like different pages between the A and B test. I'm not sure if that's how you ran the experiment or if you just happened to use two different page screenshots, but that would typically disqualify the result and require another test.
1) Why did the two groups have such different N sizes? If it was intended to be run as a 50-50, a large delta would make me wonder if there was an exposure bias
2) For the baseline rate (0.4%), this test is underpowered for even a 50% change, meaning you will have a high false discovery rate
I'm somewhat of a layman, but I'd wager A/B pages printed 50:50 (by IP for instance) could lead to a rather solid conclusion if ran long enough. On the other hand, eh, chat bubbles suck and you can quite confidently say they don't help, so might as well keep it this way. On a personal note I do feel like I would be much more prone to click a chat request as another menu option than a bubble.
I 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) 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.
Just 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.
Intercom 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.
Regardless 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.
between chat popup, cookie notice, notification confirmation, email subscription box... there is very little left to imagination then that this website is obviously on drugs
I 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.
Someone 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.
I 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.
If 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.
Indeed. 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.
No, 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.
An 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.
I 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.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 222 ms ] threadGive me the option, if I need it I will use it. Force it on me I will leave
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")
Me: "Go away."
"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.
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.
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.
I absolutely hated the US diners with multiple 'are you ok? do you need anything?' interruptions during single meal. I know why it happens, I just find it really annoying.
I would LOVE to have a restaurant where I can order from my phone at the table, signal waiters etc. And get a notification when food is ready so we can both choose when they will bring it out.
Here’s a link if you’re ever visiting and want to check it out: https://goo.gl/maps/5tiXvJDC9DBXoHYt8
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod%C3%ADzio
It's a much more pleasant experience overall.
i'm of mixed opinion--it's good when you want to be left alone to chat with your tablemates, but when you need lots of service, it can be annoying (and make you a little self-conscious). the nice thing is that you can usually still just flag down one of the usually abundant servers (back before lockdown).
We ate a lot then. Me and my friends were the terrors of buffet lines all across town ...
This is even worse (to me) because most of the time there's nothing discreet about it.
I'd rather have someone ask up front if I need help - at which point I can politely say no - than just follow me around the store, silently watching, like a hyena stalking a wounded gazelle.
Maybe chat bubbles are similar? Taking away someone's initiative might work well for things they don't want to do, but for people who know what they want or just doing research, it doesn't seem like a good plan.
Some of it is just the limitations of a SCO, in that store staff don't have to wait for each item to be weighed by the lane before moving to the next item, but a lot of is that most people are not nearly as fast as they think they are.
A lot of it depends on how hands-on the staff manning the SCOs are as well. The Costco near me implemented SCOs in the past year, but those might as well be full checkouts with the number of staff that are around them looking to help out.
Of course the cashier will always be faster, they are familiar with the interface, know where most of the barcodes are and have the codes of most non-barcoded items memorized.
But self-checkout could be much faster by removing some anti-features (from the customer POV). I have seen a couple of stores with a better solution where you pick up a scanner at the start and scan your items as you go. This has the advantage of parallelizing most of the process instead of clogging up on big expensive machines. In fact with the ability to check out on that device you could probably get by with just a "Customer Service" desk for when something goes wrong.
This is a huge contrast with my experience in the UK. Those scanners are talking, are slow to move between states, require you to put everything from one to another scale. This is indeed often slower than a human worker, and amazes me to no end.
It seems to be a classic case of bureaucratic risk aversion without proper cost analysis.
Walmart has this figured out. You just scan the item. Done. No scales, no anti-theft I can tell aside from a person watching.
Are you familiar with any similar systems today? How do they rate on throughput?
The 'metal divider, self bag' is a discount / bulk store I go to. Old-style 'casher + bagger' is another. And I've gone to stores with self-checkout, both with and without scales in them.
Seems quite varied here, with of course that variance mostly along franchise lines...
I don’t think opting-out of self checkout counts as “supporting the workers”.
As for my car... most often I'm either by transit or walking. Anyway, I could be wrong but I don't think stores offer help out where I live. I've never heard it in the decade that I've lived here.
Walmart? Are you sure? They are not known for being helpful, let alone solicitous.
Ironically, the only grocery chain that I can think of where employees actively ask if they can help is Trader Joe's. I can't help but giggle at the fact that they're German-owned, even if this part of the culture came from the American founder.
Oh I would also be very confused since Aldi is the pioneer when it comes to shopping in peace and w/o frills in Germany.
No answer, of course.
Brilliant.
A simple "live chat" link in the navigation or footer like they've done works so much better than the intrusive popups.
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.
Sorry. I didn't submit this!
We use Intercom in our product at work. But it's for customer support, and is always initiated by paying customers.
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?
I think we should keep in mind that HN readers are far from the typical internet user.
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
Sorry OP— just thought I'd point that out :)
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.)
> We first added Intercom when we launched Atlist— it just seemed like the startup thing to do.
Seems like a perfect example of a feature that wasn't born out of demand or a perceived demand - it was just one of the bells and whistles available as freebies in frameworks so why not throw it in there.
I could understand the thought process at first glance. NLP is revolutionizing things. Startups want the lastest technology if it's backed by Arxiv papers underneath enough layers. There is the image of people working dead-end jobs in call centers answering questions that nobody wants to spend time on but need to get answered anyways. So why not just make all of that go away, by inserting this ready-made digital replacement into your package.json?
I feel like the point is being missed though. Because even a call center employee working at Comcast is still a human. I think people are getting way too ahead of themselves in thinking code and "neural" networks (what a misleading term) can suddenly automate all of these things that could never be automated before, like dynamic conversations. And even before that the article proves that a single HTML form element is 62% more effective than a VC-backed GPT2-powered "solution" to a problem nobody had. Why require a dynamic conversation at all if e-mail works better?
Maybe there's some property about human interaction with founders or call center workers that's fundamentally impossible to replicate with technology, at the philosophical level, and we'd be better off investing into human resources instead of spending all of this engineering effort trying to work around that fact. Or maybe there theoretically isn't such a limitation, but I have serious doubts that 2020 is the year we'd finally be ready to declare that we've gotten past them.
If it were just about the chat we would have dropped them for a cheaper solution long ago.
They continue to roll out new features and charge more and more for them though, so they will eventually run us off. Just not yet.
The ML sprinkled over MS Office, Facebook's image tagging interface, GMail are often very useful to me, but I can't see anyone finding the suggestions so reliable they would be comfortable letting the systems silently work without guiding the process and approving changes.
It's good to have someone keeping an eye on the customer interactions. If you have such a deluge of support requests that this is a problem, maybe the actual solution is a simpler process or better communication up front.
This is the thing that is odd to me about this article.
They increased the number of conversations, ok. But are conversations valuable? How about actual conversions (not conversations)?
If conversions remained the same, but conversations went up, it seems pointless.
There's a perceived need for a Facebook page or Twitter, but how much value does it really add to either party. Especially in commerce where conversion correlates with speed, is it really worth paying that performance cost? As an example, last week I removed a bunch of integrations for a client that were adding no value and adding roughly 1.5s to First Contentful Paint.
Though as a strategy, it sometimes pays off to hurt your competitors by focusing them on features that are useless or cost them money.
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.
Or if the chat widget asks for an email address directly. But then I can just type random letters incl an @
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.
* 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.
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.
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.
p0 = 34
p1 = 45
n0 = 8004
n1 = 6622
z = -2.0924
p = 0.03662
So, the improvement is statistically significant at 95% confidence (p < 0.05)
As far as practical significance, that's debatable . . .
How much data would you need for confidence? According to my calculations this is 98% confidence. That feels like 'enough' to make a decision for my small startup.
I'm pretty explicit in the blog post that this isn't meant to be universally applicable— it's just what happened to us.
However context is important - at this level of significance you'd expect to see a similarly strong, but ultimately spurious, effect going from the A to the B test about 1 in 50 times.
Since you're not working on something safety critical, that's probably an acceptable false positive rate for you. But generally speaking, and in particular here since the absolute numbers and changes are quite small, I would be wary of trusting such a result. It seems promising but inconclusive. Maybe run a few more tests with disjoint (or nearly so) samples of visitors?
There are a few other things that could possibly confound the result - off the top of my head, your screenshots look like different pages between the A and B test. I'm not sure if that's how you ran the experiment or if you just happened to use two different page screenshots, but that would typically disqualify the result and require another test.
I was also wondering about that
1) Why did the two groups have such different N sizes? If it was intended to be run as a 50-50, a large delta would make me wonder if there was an exposure bias
2) For the baseline rate (0.4%), this test is underpowered for even a 50% change, meaning you will have a high false discovery rate
When we started Olark (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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.