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.
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!
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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 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".
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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...
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 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.
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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The problem with chatbots is one of an unfulfilled promise, an unrealistic setting of user expectations. An empty Google search window doesn't pretend to be a human being -- although it is actually very powerful. Clippy, on the other hand, has a human face and pretends to be an intelligent agent, only to fail. So chatbots, when seeming to act like a human via natural language, are held in the user's mind to a higher standard. Siri, in my iPhone, seems to strike a better balance. It takes my spoken input and gives replies (albeit not great replies). But I never get the feeling that it is trying to carry on an extended conversation with me.
This is not true of all ChatBots. In fact, some companies outright discourage using theirs as such.
USAA, for example, makes it abundantly clear that you’re talking to a robot, before beginning the conversation and provides multiple choice options for common support flows. I’m actually a big fan of theirs for things like travel notifications or ATM withdrawal limit increases.
Personally, I despise these interfaces. It’s not “chat,” I’m being provided with option prompts and everything. Why squash it all into a linear, 1D chat dialog instead of just a regular web form to do a simple task like increase your withdraw limit?
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
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.
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.
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.
>"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.
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://github.com/bcye/Hello-Goodbye/
What a strange and petty complaint.
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".
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 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.
[1]: https://javier.xyz/control-user-cursor/
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?"
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
On an iPad, the site shows it's own context sensitive cursor below the iPadOS cursor, for extra weirdness.
Although hiding the real mouse cursor probably shouldn't be allowed without a permission dialog imo.
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.
USAA, for example, makes it abundantly clear that you’re talking to a robot, before beginning the conversation and provides multiple choice options for common support flows. I’m actually a big fan of theirs for things like travel notifications or ATM withdrawal limit increases.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 !