Here at Pumpkin Web Design Manchester, we build websites specifically tailored to the requirements of companies and businesses across Manchester and the North West, including Blackburn and Chorley. We provide the perfect web design solutions for clients in all areas of business and industry. As a result, we have produced this guide to everything you should know about website chat features.
What are website chat features?
Website chat features are the addition of a small website pop-up that allows your potential customers or clients to type messages to a member of your staff directly, or to an AI system that can help answer any queries. These chat features are designed to improve the user experience and help solve problems for your customers or clients.
What are the advantages of creating website chat features that are unobtrusive?
There are a number of advantages and benefits to creating website chat features that do not take up a lot of screen space and do not automatically pop out and obstruct the screen. These advantages include:
- Improving the user experience
- Allowing your web design to take centre stage
Unobtrusive website chat features can improve the user experience
Website chat features are not a new innovation but they are becoming more and more common among small to medium sized businesses. These can bring a number of advantages to your company and allow your website to better support your potential customers and clients. However, to get the best results from this innovative design you will need to make sure that the chat features are well designed and well planned for all screen sizes and devices including mobile phone users. Currently there are a number of websites, large and small, that are using chat features that are not well optimised to the screen size, and are not meeting don’t needs of the user’s. Instead these are acting as a pop-up and obstructing much of the screen at a time. This means that:
- Website users have to expend energy closing yet another pop-up- from cookie pop-ups, to notification pop-ups, and any pop-ups your website is using for marketing purposes or sales, website users are constantly closing pop-ups. Adding an extra one in the form of an oversized, obstructive chat feature can be a step too far, which drives people away from your website.
- Website users can’t see the rest of the content- obstructive chat features take up part of the screen which means that potential customers or clients looking for particular information products or services can miss vital pieces of information or links to the pages that they need, and so end up leaving your website thinking that it doesn’t have what they need.
Making the chat feature the right size for screen and using other techniques such as animation to attract attention can be a much more effective option, allowing website users to notice that a chat option is available should they require it, but without hindering the browsing experience. This makes for a much improved user experience.
For more information, or professional web design support, get in touch with the experts today, here at Pumpkin Web Design Manchester.