Ask HN: Do you use live chat widgets on your site?

2 points by u2077 4y ago ↗ HN

I recently discovered a chat widget with a generous free tier that covered all of my needs. The goal was to have 2-way communication without the user needing to give their email address. After testing out the service and customizing it to my liking, I removed it from my site and closed my account. Mostly for the following reasons:

  - It uses cookies and my site doesn’t do any other tracking or have analytics
  - The UX wasn’t great, the best I’ve seen but still unintuitive.
  - It was annoying to allow in my content security policy
  - It slowed down my site
  - From a user’s perspective I find them annoying

So I’m wondering, has anyone found a service like this worth using, or that they genuinely like? What is your use case? How does it work?

2 comments

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XCSme 4y ago ↗

For my site I switched from a chat widget to a simple contact form, mostly because I didn't want to include 3rd party content and show cookie consent pop-ups for a chat widget. I also personally dislike any chat widget that makes sounds or pops up out of nowhere.

You can see my implementation on this site, in the bottom right widget: https://www.uxwizz.com/

Forgot to mention, I was using Tawk.to before and for some reason including their chat widget lead to page rendering to be broken, where the page would load, flash white for a brief moment, then show again.