My chatbot is dead – Why yours should probably be too • Hacker News Board

Re: My chatbot is dead – Why yours should probably be too

#161

Post by vertis » Wed, Oct 21, 2020, 6:14 AM UTC

1123581321 wrote: post #140

vertis wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

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.

Re: My chatbot is dead – Why yours should probably be too

#162

Post by nicbou » Wed, Oct 21, 2020, 7:00 AM UTC

dheera wrote: post #40

sdoering wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 muc…

> 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 hid…

uBlock has a list for cookie modal. It's pretty effective. I Don't Care About Cookies is also great.

Re: My chatbot is dead – Why yours should probably be too

#163

Post by _-___________-_ » Wed, Oct 21, 2020, 11:52 AM UTC

reificator wrote: post #33

_-___________-_ wrote: post #6

Why does my mouse cursor disappear when I move it over this website? It makes it virtually impossible to use...

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.

Not running Dark Reader, but am using uMatrix

Re: My chatbot is dead – Why yours should probably be too

#164

Post by _-___________-_ » Wed, Oct 21, 2020, 11:52 AM UTC

bluu00 wrote: post #62

_-___________-_ wrote: post #6

Why does my mouse cursor disappear when I move it over this website? It makes it virtually impossible to use...

custom cursor; dark bg - dark cursor; so yea; see how the cursor transitions when on text by flipping sideways to blue; idk I thought its 'cute';

The cursor is completely invisible for me, whether over text or links or anywhere else

Re: My chatbot is dead – Why yours should probably be too

#165

Post by bluu00 » Thu, Oct 22, 2020, 6:12 AM UTC

_-___________-_ wrote: post #164

bluu00 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

custom cursor; dark bg - dark cursor; so yea; see how the cursor transitions when on text by flipping sideways to blue; idk I thought its 'cute';

The cursor is completely invisible for me, whether over text or links or anywhere else

oh yess.

look at this,

  :root {
      ...
      cursor: none !important
    }

  html {
      ...
      cursor: none !important
    }

and this,

  * {
      cursor: url(cursor.19bbb4e3.png), none !important [0]
  }


  #cursor {
      background: rgba(200, 200, 255, .2);
      transition-property: width, height, border-radius, transform;
      transition-timing-function: ease-out;
      transition-duration: .1s;
      pointer-events: none;
      transform: translate(-50%, -50%);
      border-radius: 100%;
      position: absolute;
      left: -1000px;
      z-index: 99999;
      width: 36px;
      height: 36px
    }

[-1] : https://azumbrunnen.me/main.39afc03c.css [0] : https://azumbrunnen.me/cursor.19bbb4e3.png

He kinda messed up, mayb?

Re: My chatbot is dead – Why yours should probably be too

#166

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Re: My chatbot is dead – Why yours should probably be too

#167

Post by robertmak363 » Thu, Oct 22, 2020, 8:42 AM UTC

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Re: My chatbot is dead – Why yours should probably be too

#168

Post by thrav » Thu, Oct 22, 2020, 6:46 PM UTC

eloisius wrote: post #152

thrav wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an example, I just needed the routing number for my account to make a payment. I was like, “shit, where is that in the app again”, but had just made this comment, so I hit help, and typed “routing number”, and it immediately responded with the routing number in big bold letters. ( https://imgur.com/a/raXEyO3 ) The point is to eliminate the need to work to find stuff.

And I just typed “USAA routing number” into google and got the same result. I’m not opposed to having searchable customer support for this kind of information, I just don’t like going through the clumsy dialog charade to accomplish common tasks that require input of data.

Obviously that example can be replicated in a Google search, but that doesn’t invalidate the value of the same concept applied to protected information.

Re: My chatbot is dead – Why yours should probably be too

#169

Post by eloisius » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 4:31 PM UTC

thrav wrote: post #168

eloisius wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I just typed “USAA routing number” into google and got the same result. I’m not opposed to having searchable customer support for this kind of information, I just don’t like going through the clumsy dialog charade to accomplish common tasks that require input of data.

Obviously that example can be replicated in a Google search, but that doesn’t invalidate the value of the same concept applied to protected information.

Again, not against having fake robot chat as a an add-on to help surface context-specific information, or even complete complex tasks if you prefer to do so, but to me it feels like a step backwards if it _replaces_ traditional HCI. It feels like the reverse of when we went from navigating phone trees and talking to humans to using a website to do a simple task like "change my mailing address." The advent of being able to do those kind of things online was what drew me to online banks like Ally over traditional banks. It's so much more efficient. Now it feels like things are regressing back to awkward synchronous interactions, sometimes complete with artificial pauses and "typing" bubbles to make it feel more human. Too bad the agent you're interacting with is too dumb to let you correct simple typos without having to figure out how to re-enter whatever process you're in.

We have sophisticated data inputs that we've developed for decades. Tons of usability and accessibility thought has gone into things like how someone can select a date, or input a number. Throwing all that away for a dumb NLP chatbot because "Wow! AI!" is a shame. Tack on a glorified search interface that looks like a support rep with an IQ of like 20 if you like, but please don't funnel me into it when I'm already on your site or app and I've purposefully selected a menu item like "close my account."