Last month we removed our live chat bubble and replaced it with a link to live chat in our navigation.

It led to a 62% increase in new chat conversations:

This may not be universally applicable but it's what happened to us.

The Startup "Thing To Do"

We first added Intercom when we launched Atlist— it just seemed like the startup thing to do.

But we immediately found the Intercom chat bubble annoying— it would clutter up our interface and even obstruct elements:

We found ourself designing around the chat bubble.

In a moment of desperation we created a "hide chat bubble" option in our settings— that way we could at least hide it for ourselves and stop being annoyed by it.

But the "hide chat bubble" option never felt satisfying. We knew hadn't solved the problem— we had just hid it from ourselves.

The Test

We decided to do a test. We removed the Intercom chat bubble...

... and replaced it with a link to live chat in our navigation:

Users had the option to begin a live chat once they clicked the navigation link:

The navigation link led to a 62% increase in live chat conversations.

Here are the numbers from the test:

Chat Bubble Blindness

This felt like a win— I like live chat but I hate chat bubbles.

And if I hate them, maybe users hate them too? Maybe users have developed a chat bubble blindness— just like banner ad blindness.

In any case, don't expect to see a chat bubble on Atlist ever again. 😊