> Chat bots work best where users already are. If your users are primarily spending time in messaging platforms where bots and micro-apps can be seamlessly embedded, great.
Fully agreed with that. While for sure "boring" for many and not good as marketing tools, the best "chat bots" IMHO basically are inline commandline tools that help specific communities.
You can get current cursor position, and you can render things at arbitrary positions on the screen. Making this not possible would probably unnecessarily restrict your ability to build even actually useful things.
Although hiding the real mouse cursor probably shouldn't be allowed without a permission dialog imo.
Yep the following part is fine with me, it's hiding the mouse cursor that is alienating.
I would have thought it to be OK for a website to pick from a few standard system cursors (pointer, hand, I-bar, move, resize, etc.) but not no cursor.
If this gets traction please remember to allow hiding cursor if the user has full screened something! -- person trying to watch a video without a lil pointer in the way
Or maybe the browser should implement hiding the cursor after 10 seconds of inactivity if the user has full-screened something.
If a website made your cursor disappear immediately upon full screen that would be freaky, as if you lost control of your machine, thus, I don't think the websites should have this capability.
This site breaks other rules too. Zooming out doesn’t make the font smaller, but makes the column narrower while keeping the font the same size, reducing the amount of text per line (the opposite of what I wanted).
Wanted to jump to the comments complain about this.
Snark: Apparently anyone can call themselves UX/UI experts nowadays. I guess I shouldn't worry about getting qualifications and just slap that label onto my CV...
Yup, I didn't even bother to read the article. I went immediately to the comment section to complain.
It's really weird that people actually spend hours and days on implementations like this because they and are seemingly the only people that actually find enjoyment in it. If you were to talk to your friends about it they would probably say "it's cool" but many of us are still going to say "Why?"
I can barely fathom that allowing this has even crossed browser developer's minds. This feature is just evil from the start and every browser feature, no matter how trivial or benign will eventually be abused.
> This feature is just evil from the start and every browser feature, no matter how trivial or benign will eventually be abused.
That's the problem, though. Motivated humans can weaponize anything. We spend too much time trying to stave off the impossible, instead of going after the abusers - which today often are the presumably legitimate businesses, as a lot of feature misuse became standard business practice.
I'm surprised it hasn't been. Someone should just implement this on an online store, so that your mouse doesn't appear to be over the "Buy now" button, but in actuality the click would register as clicking that button.
Or better, the click would cast a vote for the candidate the developer prefers...
This page works by hiding the mouse cursor and displaying an image that looks like it. So it's not like the browser developers deliberately added a feature to make this possible.
Disappointing? At first, I was thinking that this designer was just a junior designer and they didn't know better, maybe learning how to implement designs so it's fine, we can't all be pros for day one.
But now when I realize that this was made from someone at Google's UX team, it all makes sense. Interacting with this site feels exactly like interacting with the typical Google property, where all standards and expectations gets thrown out for something that probably looks pretty on the designers screen but is 80% off for everyone else.
I was initially distracted by the cursor, thought it was horrible, then tried to read the text but realised I could barely focus on it give the ridiculous size. Just awful.
Looks like it's trying to emulate how the cursor works on iPadOS. I can appreciate the experiment, and I think the execution here is quite good (doesn't feel sluggish at all to me). However, I agree that this just isn't something websites should do.
On an iPad, the site shows it's own context sensitive cursor below the iPadOS cursor, for extra weirdness.
Doesn't seem to be about resolution — it works fine on my 5120 x 2880 monitor (macOS Catalina). I'd guess it's probably to do with hardware acceleration not being used, or something like that.
Rather, no software re-implementation of a cursor will ever feel as fluid as the "hardware cursor". Might also be related to my screen refresh rate of 120 Hz in this case.
Yes, a lot of people tend to move the mouse down the screen as they're reading. Having the pointer highlighted and then turn into a cursor and keep following your pointer is extremely distracting. I really don't understand what the appeal is.
I'm not sure why it took so long for people to recognize this. An overwhelming majority of chatbots I've used are utter rubbish and are better served through a regular interface (search, directory listing, etc).
Everyone dreads call menus / phone trees - chatbots are largely the same except there are easier & better UX alternatives in an online medium.
Because customers want to talk to a person, and executives don't want to pay for that person. Enter a slick salesman with a bogus "AI-based machine-learning customer service automation" spiel, and bob's your uncle
I had to call UPS because of a wrong delivery state a few weeks ago. I ended about in their automated phone system where you don‘t anymore press numbers but rather say what you would like. There‘s never an option to talk to a human.
I ended up googling and found out a secret keyword to talk to an agent who one can directly say after choosing a language. I never have been connected faster to a human when calling a large companys hotline.
Many of those systems are configured in a way that they connect you to a human if they can't figure out what you're saying.
The audio from those calls is fed to a team of people who are responsible for teaching the system, so that the next model can be more accurate in directing calls.
I once met someone who had been working that gig while in university. Apparently the vast majority of the recordings are boring and easy enough for a human to classify, but some are just people rattling off swear words, screaming, etc.
Got rear-ended in France once, called the rental car company to report the problem (damaged car), turned out you had to speak to the automated system in French to get directed to someone to actually talk to. I don't speak French. There were no other options. So the guy that rear-ended my rental car actually had to help out with the call.. even that was problematic, he lived in France but wasn't a native, apparently his French wasn't quite good enough for the system. Hertz, that's not something you should have as your user interface at your Hertz office at an international airport.
I feel like most of us were wise to the fact that this was a terrible idea on day one. It was funny to watch MBAs try to cash in on the "next big thing" in tech, though.
I can't get the page to load reliably enough to test, but I saw the same issue.
Are you running the Dark Reader extension by chance?
I think the author didn't test with Dark Reader, which is fair, but they override the cursor, which is not fair. Please don't do that, it's not as cool as you think it is and it breaks things for your users.
I absolutely despise those pop-up "Can I help you" boxes on product websites (usually Intercom). It completely disrupts my flow as a reader in trying to understand the product.
That attention disruption got so bad I blocked Intercom and their ilk via injected CSS rules.
I really want to take it a step further and write a plug in to interface a chat bot with the human on the other end and waste their time so sites begin to learn to stop using that BS.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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.
> 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.)
> 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.
This is exactly right. The GDPR only says that you have to ask users for their consent if you want to use their data in a way that is not strictly required for the service they request from you. If you stop tracking your users, then you don't need to have stupid popups and modals, most of which are probably illegal anyway, since the default action tends to be the one that allows all the tracking cookies. The problem with GDPR is that it's not really being enforced much.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
The organization can’t do anything about visitors who are testing them with secret little rules about when they will withhold business. More typical power users are able to just ignore support options they don’t want to use and use the product.
I like the WW2 story as well, but when chat increases total interactions and conversions, it’s hard to make a case for survivorship bias.
I'm not arguing against chat in itself, merely implementations of it that interrupt the flow of what you are doing.
For example, chat popups that ask you to interact before you've had a chance to even read the title of the page.
Every customer who hasn't purchased yet is part of a funnel, and you absolutely CAN test with an A/B test (or equivalent) whether you're losing people when you annoy them by popping something up on the screen.
And perhaps I'm an outlier. If the A/B test says you get more sales when you annoy the customer, who am I to argue (or it annoys me and not them). But it does mean you will have them as a customer and not me, and that's fine.
I don't think I'm wrong to use this as one of many indicators of how annoying a SaaS is going to be to deal with over the long term.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
The only ones I really despise are the ones that pop open as soon as you open the page - I haven't even read the damned page title yet, so no, I would not like to ask any questions or tell you anything about my requirements! Just.. go away!
Actually, the ones I really despise with a burning passion are the ones like above, but which follow you around the whole site like some kind of demented Clippy 2.0 - you close the popup and navigate to another page and... BAM! It's back, again!
Yep, It's not just Clippy, it's anything that I would want to dismiss and then it doesn't persist.
https://coworker.com has this annoying banner at the moment advertising their global pass.
Nice X to close. I refresh page and it's back. If I clear my cookies or my adblock causes a javascript error, then fair enough. Otherwise, persist my decisions please.
I know it's a lot of work to inspect the DOM and do this for every site but I just hate banners and popups that much, and very often multiple websites reuse the same banner code so my efforts start paying off after dealing with a few dozen.
NoScript goes a long way to making the web usable again. Most of these crappy applets are embedded from 3rd party domains, so you can whitelist the primary domain and still block this junk. It's a bit of a pain, yes, but I can't imagine browsing without it.
Funny how the end result of all that Chatbot hype from 2017-2018 kinda just became these shitty Intercom boxes. My insurance company used an inapp chatbot around that time and I setup my account with it, that was a good experience but it didn't seem like a form would have been much different.
I agree that most of the time its just an annoying popup to close. But (and this was more of a thing a few years ago) when I actually want to ask someone a quick question or get a quick ballpark estimate. But They've mostly all been replaced with robots or are just a disguised contact us form for you to say what you want then enter your email.
It'd be interesting to just have it connect two chat boxes to each other, and inject just enough randomised text to each of them first to get them to start talking past each other.
> I absolutely despise those pop-up "Can I help you" boxes on product websites
Agree. Over the last few years, I started running into those more and more often as well. From an UX standpoint I would categorize them somewhere between marque/blink tags and rotating GIF icons.
Actually, that was roughly the time from which I recall first running into those things on corporate websites (IIRC Yello Strom in Germany had one in the early 2000s, widely know for a particular Easter egg).
I find it kind of funny that those are having a revival in recent years, along with animated GIFs (abused as a video format this time round) and annoying overuse of the word "cyber".
The real-life equivalent of this is one of the main reasons why I prefer to shop online (except for groceries). It's just not possible to study the products without a "Can I help you?" salesperson popping up next to you after a minute.
I love our local Ace Hardware (and I have a soft spot having worked part time for one many decades ago), but the amount of "can I help you" when you walk into the store is almost suffocating. To their credit, they do leave me alone once I get past the initial onslaught, and are GENUINELY helpful if I need help after that and seek someone out, but yeah, I feel you on this one.
I'd counter with nearly everyone goes away if you say "no thank you, just looking" and there is a non trivial amount of time that I actually do need help, the person is fairly helpful, especially at my local hardware store and smaller stores.
They are the internet equivalent of the retail store clerk coming up to you to ask if they can help you. No. Go away. I'm here for a transaction, not a relationship.
In (weak) defense of Intercom, it's nice when used correctly. For instance, if we're experiencing a service outage, we can send a notice to all active users with that service enabled. But there are limited use cases where it's valuable, and it is heavily abused.
I hate them too, specially the annoying ones with a sound and an animation, but they seem to work. At least in the last company I worked it was the main way for customers to contact CS and support.
I think part of the problem is that you are not the target audience of the chatbot. For the past year, I've run Intercom on a small saas app (https://www.delayforreddit.com) and I get great feedback from end-users. They love to be able to reach out to me on any page rather than hunting for a support email.
A large component of the problem is that many sites overuse Intercom and don't realize how it impacts their end user experience.
Chatbots are dead, long live chatbots! I firmly believe we are going through the “through of disillusionment” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle). We need to figure out ways to really bring value to people and not just raise money for the next AI based Chatbot system!
I'm not a user myself, but assistants (Alexa, Google's, Cortana, etc) are chatbots and seem to be quite in swing. Not as hyped as last year, but still.
Google Assistant actually works, especially it's speech recognition that has been near flawless for me. I can totally see it becoming an integrated feature in future housing constructions.
This is exactly right - and that initial website was written during the "peak of inflated expectations" part.
I still think that chatbots provide an entirely new way of interacting with software. We're very used to dividing our desktop up into windows, and giving each process it's own two-dimensional real estate.
Conversation-oriented UI design fundamentally is different to that: you are escaping the 2D arrangement and allowing applications to collaborate with teams of people in a totally new way.
It is possible that we are not there yet. Sure, the current experience sucks. We need a few leaps in Conversational AI to make chatbots more usable. It will take some time but hopefully we will get there.
According to Wikipedia Clippy's German name was "Karl Klammer". I used MS Office at that time but luckily do not remember that absolutely cringeworthy name. Holy shit, what were they smoking at Microsoft in the early 2000s?
Great read, Adrian! I've been following your work since you launched the UX Bear.
To sum up my experience with chatbots: I've had deeper conversations with clippy than with most chatbots.
Still, I strongly believe that guidance is needed online, especially in E-Commerce. That's why I've recently (in fact, we are signing our seed round later today) created Neocom [1], which merges the good parts about chatbots with real expert knowledge.
Let's not forget: in the greater scheme of things, chatbots really are still in their infancy. For those old enough to remember, picture the computer interfaces of yesteryear - say, the 80s - and ask the people who had to work with them back then how many of them enjoyed the experience. And I'm not talking about computer scientists and the likes, I mean your average office worker.
Fast forward to 2020, and you cannot throw a rock with closed eyes without hitting some kind of "computer". Smartphones, tablets, laptops, everywhere. There is not just one factor that made this change come about but a lot: arguably, computers are generally more useful today than they were back in the day, and this is part capability and part usability.
Both seem to still lack quite a bit in today's chatbots. I think a big hurdle has already been taken, though, by turning to voice rather than typing as the primary input modality. This wasn't possible just a decade ago because automatic speech recognition just didn't work well enough. But there's still lots to be desired today.
Using a conversational UI where a simple button or a few clicks would suffice is utterly useless. As is, say, having your bot read out to you a long list of movies when you ask "what's showing in the theater tonight"? Traditional GUIs are much superior here.
No, voice based interactions shine when they are about complex matters. Stuff that is too difficult or too cumbersome to express with other means. Perhaps because there a lot of different options combined in your query. Or because some inference is required on the chatbot side. Or because it's not a single query at all but -- shock! -- an actual dialog that will get you to your goal.
A small and completely made-up example:
User: I'm meeting Dana for dinner at 7, and perhaps we'd like to go and see a movie afterwards. What's on tonight?
System: Where are you having dinner?
User: In the West End.
System: Super Marvels is playing in the Broadway at 9.
User: Oh, no, Dana hates super hero movies.
System: I see. What does she like?
User: I don't know - comedies, I guess. Thrillers, maybe.
System: Well, the Broadway is also showing Dark Waters at 9.
So, this is obviously your standard ticket purchasing scenario, and you can do this perfectly fine today using any standard form-based app or website. But the point is that you don't want to go through the hassle of setting all the right parameters, such as time, location, genre etc. by hand -- especially when you're not really sure about some of them.
Compared to a dialog like the above, today's conversational UI's are very simplistic. We're still with at least one leg in the stone ages. But there is real potential here but there's also a real risk that we'll never get there because once conversational UIs get a bad rep, then it's over.
Like with any technology, if it is over-hyped with respect to what it can actually deliver (currently), it won't last. I think that is what the author of the above article has experiences. High expectations, low delivery.
I, for one, hope that we can hold on and that conversational UI's won't go the way of 3D TV (goodbye...) or VR (niche), but at this point, I wouldn't know which way to put my money on.
You are realizing the huge amount of control you are handing over in this dialog compared to quickly scanning a list of potential shows and being able to quickly scan available seats and prices?
Information is power and these chat interfaces will sooner or later prey on the less informed.
Relate to OP here. I also built a travel chat bot[1] (now dead) in early stages of chatbot boom. Initially it felt like conversational UX is so much better. But very soon I realized I myself was not using what I built. What we don't realize is how efficient we have become using websites through that navigating through chatbot UX definitely feels waste of time.
I am an engineer at a profitable chatbot company (HelloTars).
I can't entirely agree with the points mentioned in this article.
Yes, a chatbot is not ready to replace human support.
However, there are other areas where they show good results.
We have been helping customers with lead generation chatbots for the last four years.
What we have learnt is customers would instead engage with a chatbot than filling up lengthy forms. Because chatbot nudges users to give information.
Also in websites where you have a lot of information to convey, ex: banks, mortgages, etc. again chatbot makes sense. Because it helps give information that's selective to the customer. And they don't have to struggle through a lot of information presented to them at once.
We have customers who use our chatbot link directly on google ads.
We have also noticed our customers maturing over time and demanding more functionalities on the chatbots.
To summarize, no chatbots are not dead. They are only beginning. However, you need to narrow down on a specific problem and solve it.
> To summarize, no chatbots are not dead. They are only beginning.
Yes, there will likely be more chatbots in the future. And yes, THEN they will be usable. But no, it's not a good user experience yet.
If a website needs a chatbot they:
- Didn't put enough effort in organizing the website
Nothing wrong with this. You can say this about practically any company using software for anything. Not spending money on people is the point of enterprise software.
The thing is, if you look at the stats for questions of real support, the vast majority of those questions are things that did not ever need "real support" - no matter how much or little support you're offering, half or more of the questions they get can be answered even by a "bot" that simply enters your query in a search engine and returns the first answer.
So there is always the temptation to save costs of your support with a pre-filter, so that your support can talk to people who actually have a question or problem that needs to be talked about.
It's the equivalent of "have you tried turning it off and on again?". This question must be asked, because it actually resolves a substantial portion of the issues - but it does seem quite wasteful to employ people to whom 30% of the calls ends with asking that question. Or, for other scenarios, reading verbatim one of the top answers from your FAQ page.
Yep, I agree. However, even in the wake of GTP-3, maybe it is time to abandon the term Chatbot. Essentially "chatbots" are a tool to deal with unstructured data/content. At least this is how I see them: a better search interface.
Most chatbots are just bad: either just trying to get your mail-address because no support person is online or being a convoluted menu in the tiniest window.
It would be fair to rule those out and look at more conversational chatbots that provide good guidance through form filling, understand natural language and maybe are even hybrids that can be taken over by humans when they fail themselves.
A simple form of the hybrids is some pre-processing. The bot says "hello" and "whats your problem" or identifies your account and than human support staff jumps right in to the action.
As a builder of chatbots and "conversational AI", non-annoying human-like chatbots are at least 20 years away, and ML approaches have not resulted in any improvements over basic symbolic reasoning approaches.
My favorite chatbot experience lately has been support directing me to the chatbot, which then informs me that I am capable of resolving the issue of cancelling/refunding or making changes to my transaction. It just happens to be the case, that I ordered the wrong thing. Simple as that.
As I travel to the appropriate link, there is none such ability or option. I relay the appropriate message to their customer service. Fast forward a day later, they were unable to reply to my message in time, they have already processed the order, and are actually begging me to accept the purchase because as a small company they are incapable of managing their customer service department.
All in all, I felt bad that they would have lost a substantial amount on my cancellation or refund. But I can't help but feel the entire situation could have been avoided if they had eschewed the "benefit" of "automating" their customer service.
I think a good reason Salesforce has been so successful is that they force users to abide by the one-reply system of following up on customers.
>"The moment you create a chat bot is the moment you allow customers to have a conversation with your brand. Not with yourself, not with your friend, but with an uber entity—a symbol—that represents everything you and your team stand for. That’s not a step to be taken lightly."
As opposed to a call center in an impoverished country staffed with subsistence wage workers with an average tenure in the job of something like 6 months or less?
Companies talk a lot about CX and CRM until it's time to spend money on the front line workers who actually interact with the customers.
168 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 243 ms ] threadFully agreed with that. While for sure "boring" for many and not good as marketing tools, the best "chat bots" IMHO basically are inline commandline tools that help specific communities.
Although hiding the real mouse cursor probably shouldn't be allowed without a permission dialog imo.
I would have thought it to be OK for a website to pick from a few standard system cursors (pointer, hand, I-bar, move, resize, etc.) but not no cursor.
If a website made your cursor disappear immediately upon full screen that would be freaky, as if you lost control of your machine, thus, I don't think the websites should have this capability.
Snark: Apparently anyone can call themselves UX/UI experts nowadays. I guess I shouldn't worry about getting qualifications and just slap that label onto my CV...
It's really weird that people actually spend hours and days on implementations like this because they and are seemingly the only people that actually find enjoyment in it. If you were to talk to your friends about it they would probably say "it's cool" but many of us are still going to say "Why?"
[1]: https://javier.xyz/control-user-cursor/
That's the problem, though. Motivated humans can weaponize anything. We spend too much time trying to stave off the impossible, instead of going after the abusers - which today often are the presumably legitimate businesses, as a lot of feature misuse became standard business practice.
Or better, the click would cast a vote for the candidate the developer prefers...
It's quite disappointing that it took a Google UX design lead to come up with something like this.
But now when I realize that this was made from someone at Google's UX team, it all makes sense. Interacting with this site feels exactly like interacting with the typical Google property, where all standards and expectations gets thrown out for something that probably looks pretty on the designers screen but is 80% off for everyone else.
On an iPad, the site shows it's own context sensitive cursor below the iPadOS cursor, for extra weirdness.
It's almost as bad as websites customizing the CSS or scroll bars. Don't do that.
Everyone dreads call menus / phone trees - chatbots are largely the same except there are easier & better UX alternatives in an online medium.
I ended up googling and found out a secret keyword to talk to an agent who one can directly say after choosing a language. I never have been connected faster to a human when calling a large companys hotline.
The audio from those calls is fed to a team of people who are responsible for teaching the system, so that the next model can be more accurate in directing calls.
I once met someone who had been working that gig while in university. Apparently the vast majority of the recordings are boring and easy enough for a human to classify, but some are just people rattling off swear words, screaming, etc.
Are you running the Dark Reader extension by chance?
I think the author didn't test with Dark Reader, which is fair, but they override the cursor, which is not fair. Please don't do that, it's not as cool as you think it is and it breaks things for your users.
look at this,
and this, [-1] : https://azumbrunnen.me/main.39afc03c.css [0] : https://azumbrunnen.me/cursor.19bbb4e3.pngHe kinda messed up, mayb?
That attention disruption got so bad I blocked Intercom and their ilk via injected CSS rules.
I really want to take it a step further and write a plug in to interface a chat bot with the human on the other end and waste their time so sites begin to learn to stop using that BS.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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).
Sure, but they can't track me anyway :)
GDPR is about all tracking - cookies are just one implementation.
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?
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
The supermajority here does, or so I would guess.
We aren’t representative, and that’s important to remember when designing user interfaces.
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.
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
I like the WW2 story as well, but when chat increases total interactions and conversions, it’s hard to make a case for survivorship bias.
For example, chat popups that ask you to interact before you've had a chance to even read the title of the page.
Every customer who hasn't purchased yet is part of a funnel, and you absolutely CAN test with an A/B test (or equivalent) whether you're losing people when you annoy them by popping something up on the screen.
And perhaps I'm an outlier. If the A/B test says you get more sales when you annoy the customer, who am I to argue (or it annoys me and not them). But it does mean you will have them as a customer and not me, and that's fine.
I don't think I'm wrong to use this as one of many indicators of how annoying a SaaS is going to be to deal with over the long term.
this. chatbots are significantly less than what they're hyped up to be.
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.
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/
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?
https://github.com/bcye/Hello-Goodbye/
Actually, the ones I really despise with a burning passion are the ones like above, but which follow you around the whole site like some kind of demented Clippy 2.0 - you close the popup and navigate to another page and... BAM! It's back, again!
https://coworker.com has this annoying banner at the moment advertising their global pass.
Nice X to close. I refresh page and it's back. If I clear my cookies or my adblock causes a javascript error, then fair enough. Otherwise, persist my decisions please.
For a next version of this sketch they could borrow some inspiration here: https://darkpatterns.org/
Agree. Over the last few years, I started running into those more and more often as well. From an UX standpoint I would categorize them somewhere between marque/blink tags and rotating GIF icons.
Actually, that was roughly the time from which I recall first running into those things on corporate websites (IIRC Yello Strom in Germany had one in the early 2000s, widely know for a particular Easter egg).
I find it kind of funny that those are having a revival in recent years, along with animated GIFs (abused as a video format this time round) and annoying overuse of the word "cyber".
What a strange and petty complaint.
I still think that chatbots provide an entirely new way of interacting with software. We're very used to dividing our desktop up into windows, and giving each process it's own two-dimensional real estate.
Conversation-oriented UI design fundamentally is different to that: you are escaping the 2D arrangement and allowing applications to collaborate with teams of people in a totally new way.
Here is something I wrote about that: https://riskfirst.org/complexity/Betting-On-RPA
It's the digital version of the "automated phone guidance thing". The "press 1 for sales, press 2 for accounts, press 9 to kill yourself" !
I think many of the "smaller" websites has been sold a lie ! I see "silly/useless bots" that only makes the customer mad instead of helping him.
Just to show I'm not all hate and brimstone :) I found adding a "manned whatsApp" to your website is gold !
ChatBOXES on the other hand are amazing, a few reasons why:
- You can't accidentally hang up and have to re-dial and wait on hold
- There's an incentive for the company to respond while the customer is there, because they might disappear at any moment (unlike email)
- There's a record in writing
- It works with people with poor language skills
- No hold music & you can see where you are in the queue
- Support teams can scale by handling multiple conversations at once and using copy/paste from scripts, terms etc.
- You can include hyperlinks, screenshots etc. to make things super clear or open up other tools (e.g. screen share)
- Contact details, email address etc. can't be misheard
- No bad signal / fuzzy line
- You can data mine the requests to figure out common requests and optimize for them
Long live the chatbox!
To sum up my experience with chatbots: I've had deeper conversations with clippy than with most chatbots.
Still, I strongly believe that guidance is needed online, especially in E-Commerce. That's why I've recently (in fact, we are signing our seed round later today) created Neocom [1], which merges the good parts about chatbots with real expert knowledge.
[1] https://neocom.ai
Fast forward to 2020, and you cannot throw a rock with closed eyes without hitting some kind of "computer". Smartphones, tablets, laptops, everywhere. There is not just one factor that made this change come about but a lot: arguably, computers are generally more useful today than they were back in the day, and this is part capability and part usability.
Both seem to still lack quite a bit in today's chatbots. I think a big hurdle has already been taken, though, by turning to voice rather than typing as the primary input modality. This wasn't possible just a decade ago because automatic speech recognition just didn't work well enough. But there's still lots to be desired today.
Using a conversational UI where a simple button or a few clicks would suffice is utterly useless. As is, say, having your bot read out to you a long list of movies when you ask "what's showing in the theater tonight"? Traditional GUIs are much superior here.
No, voice based interactions shine when they are about complex matters. Stuff that is too difficult or too cumbersome to express with other means. Perhaps because there a lot of different options combined in your query. Or because some inference is required on the chatbot side. Or because it's not a single query at all but -- shock! -- an actual dialog that will get you to your goal.
A small and completely made-up example:
So, this is obviously your standard ticket purchasing scenario, and you can do this perfectly fine today using any standard form-based app or website. But the point is that you don't want to go through the hassle of setting all the right parameters, such as time, location, genre etc. by hand -- especially when you're not really sure about some of them.Compared to a dialog like the above, today's conversational UI's are very simplistic. We're still with at least one leg in the stone ages. But there is real potential here but there's also a real risk that we'll never get there because once conversational UIs get a bad rep, then it's over.
Like with any technology, if it is over-hyped with respect to what it can actually deliver (currently), it won't last. I think that is what the author of the above article has experiences. High expectations, low delivery.
I, for one, hope that we can hold on and that conversational UI's won't go the way of 3D TV (goodbye...) or VR (niche), but at this point, I wouldn't know which way to put my money on.
Information is power and these chat interfaces will sooner or later prey on the less informed.
[1] https://www.itnry.com
I can't entirely agree with the points mentioned in this article.
Yes, a chatbot is not ready to replace human support.
However, there are other areas where they show good results.
We have been helping customers with lead generation chatbots for the last four years.
What we have learnt is customers would instead engage with a chatbot than filling up lengthy forms. Because chatbot nudges users to give information.
Also in websites where you have a lot of information to convey, ex: banks, mortgages, etc. again chatbot makes sense. Because it helps give information that's selective to the customer. And they don't have to struggle through a lot of information presented to them at once.
We have customers who use our chatbot link directly on google ads.
We have also noticed our customers maturing over time and demanding more functionalities on the chatbots.
To summarize, no chatbots are not dead. They are only beginning. However, you need to narrow down on a specific problem and solve it.
Yes, there will likely be more chatbots in the future. And yes, THEN they will be usable. But no, it's not a good user experience yet. If a website needs a chatbot they:
- Didn't put enough effort in organizing the website
- Don't want to spend money on real support
- Hate their customers
Nothing wrong with this. You can say this about practically any company using software for anything. Not spending money on people is the point of enterprise software.
So there is always the temptation to save costs of your support with a pre-filter, so that your support can talk to people who actually have a question or problem that needs to be talked about.
It's the equivalent of "have you tried turning it off and on again?". This question must be asked, because it actually resolves a substantial portion of the issues - but it does seem quite wasteful to employ people to whom 30% of the calls ends with asking that question. Or, for other scenarios, reading verbatim one of the top answers from your FAQ page.
Yep, I agree. However, even in the wake of GTP-3, maybe it is time to abandon the term Chatbot. Essentially "chatbots" are a tool to deal with unstructured data/content. At least this is how I see them: a better search interface.
It would be fair to rule those out and look at more conversational chatbots that provide good guidance through form filling, understand natural language and maybe are even hybrids that can be taken over by humans when they fail themselves.
A simple form of the hybrids is some pre-processing. The bot says "hello" and "whats your problem" or identifies your account and than human support staff jumps right in to the action.
As I travel to the appropriate link, there is none such ability or option. I relay the appropriate message to their customer service. Fast forward a day later, they were unable to reply to my message in time, they have already processed the order, and are actually begging me to accept the purchase because as a small company they are incapable of managing their customer service department.
All in all, I felt bad that they would have lost a substantial amount on my cancellation or refund. But I can't help but feel the entire situation could have been avoided if they had eschewed the "benefit" of "automating" their customer service.
I think a good reason Salesforce has been so successful is that they force users to abide by the one-reply system of following up on customers.
As opposed to a call center in an impoverished country staffed with subsistence wage workers with an average tenure in the job of something like 6 months or less?
Companies talk a lot about CX and CRM until it's time to spend money on the front line workers who actually interact with the customers.
Why is replacing badly structured content with low quality NLP an improvement to the user experience?