HACKER Q&A
📣 u2077

Do you use live chat widgets on your site?


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?

  👤 XCSme Accepted Answer ✓
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/