All my clients wanted a carousel, now it's an AI chatbot (opens in new tab)

> Then the trend quietly died, as trends do. Not because anyone decided carousels were bad. Just because something newer came along to copy.

> [...]

> I've started asking clients a simple question when they bring it up. Not to be difficult, just to understand.

> [...]

> It's not about utility. It's not even really about the chatbot. It's about visibility, the fear of looking behind.

> [...]

> No pop-ups. No blinking corners. Just content, clear and immediate.

It’s been long enough that this might even have plausibly come from a human with LLM writing overrepresented in their brain rather than an LLM. But either way there’s this record-scratch feeling that I experience on each one of these, and (fittingly) it just completely knocks me out of the groove, requiring deliberate effort to resume reading.

And, I mean, none of these is even bad in isolation, but it sure feels like we’re due either a backlash where these patterns become underused even when appropriate, or them becoming so common they lose their power (is syntax subject to semantic bleaching?). Or perhaps both. Socioliguists are going to have a blast.

My partner works at a nonprofit and they paid some consultant for a chat bot. The next month they were surprised they got a $2000 bill for the API use and at first wondered if the bot was really popular. The analytics reveled that very few conversations were happening.

The consultants apparently had the bot load and fed it an immediate prompt which greeted the user. This was happening on every page load. Bad consultants, bad bot.

“It's about visibility, the fear of looking behind”

This sums up everything driving the tech sector right now. From execs at big tech to nobodies on X.

EDIT; if I think about the nature of it. The visibility fight is the decreasing attention with increasing channels and noise. Visibility tactics go to the extreme. And the fear of looking behind comes from the previous tech cycles and the thoughts around what if you had missed those? And maybe those with the most fear are the ones that did.

The carousel also had a political component: you can have every exec's pet project above the fold on the start page. Users develop banner blindness and scroll past without noticing. In an odd way everybody wins.

> The real irony is that building something genuinely simple, something that loads instantly and says exactly what it needs to say and nothing more, is often harder than bolting on a chatbot. But that's invisible work. Nobody sees the restraint.

This applies to almost anything. Sadly.

These chatbot and google login are my most hated feature of current web.

Obviously it just a script embedded in the page, so it has not actual place in the design. So the effect, especially on mobile, is this dance of starting to read a page, have it obscured by annoying popups, and trying (and failing) to close the popup with the hidden 12x12 pixels x button.

Just like the entire ads market, it’s all forgery to drive up clicks so owners can say to the clients that there is interaction.

Don’t get me started on the recent YouTube ads on iPad that place a banner that sits on top of the video, hiding subtitles, and closing it is behind a menu that requires you to be a brain surgeon specialist in order to interact with, instead of clicking the ad itself. I currently have 15 tabs in safari for ads that I inadvertently clicked.

Same reason why WordPress is the de facto for businesses. You can create a "full" website with a few clicks and add some plugins to make it look complete despite it running like shit. It's all perception.

The obvious solution is to implement a mock chatbot that answers from a set of pregenerated wrong answers. Noone will know the difference.

> No pop-ups. No blinking corners. Just content

Your clients seem to have got what they wanted, or at least someone who has learned to write like one.

Try a really daft innovation: a phone line staffed by real people.

>> A way of saying: we're keeping up.

Back in the day, websites could just put up an animated "under construction" gif.

Same energy as the carousel era. The client doesnt actually want a chatbot, they want to not feel behind. The question nobody asks is 'what would this chatbot actually do that a good FAQ page cant?' and usually the honest anwser is nothing, but it looks modern and thats enough to get through the meeting.

I had the same experience with chatbots, but we shipped a chatbot module a year ago that helps with complex config questions by reading and answering based on a Salesforce Experience site.

I was skeptical but it gets a 68 NPS from users, even if we do get the occasional "why are you investing in AI I hate it" coming through the feedback channel.

As ever, the issue is "what problem are you solving". If it's that you want more people to put their hand up and talk to you/order something, chatbots seem like a bad solution. If it's that you have a ton of complex docs that people have to read in order to implement and use your product, it's not the solution but it's probably part of a solution.

In a world of carousels, banners, and chatbots. Be a McMaster-Carr.

Wait. That requires having a desirable and non-manipulative product or service? Hmmm... Lots of business in for a rough time.

I stress over this with my own website-for-work. If I make the developer’s version of my site, who am I talking to? Other devs. If I make the version that appeals to agencies and casual users, there’s a constant voice in my head trying to drag me back to something simpler, lighter, judging me for that threejs hero section. As with all things, I guess it’s a matter of finding the right balance. Web development sure is in a very strange place and transitioning hard right now - off topic but I’m seeing more and more people looking for work and fewer and fewer job postings, especially for freelancers like myself. But maybe I’m not advertising AI bot integrations hard enough.

Wait, websites were adding cookie banners when they didn't need them just to look modern?! Those bastards! Could there also be newsletter signup pop-ups on sites that won't even send you any spam but they do it to look cool?

Show your clients McMaster-Carr. It's not "simple". It is efficient.

I've built chatbot demos for big corps like Walmart and other non-tech brands. What they want is "something that looks AI." The problem with chatbots is they don't work.

I think an important subtlety here is that clients/‘normies’ look at different websites to us, so the taste in websites that they cultivate is different to ours.

So the solution is: simple, beautiful, effective websites with no unnecessary complications. And certified hand calculated hashes, to show that you invested heavily in the presentation. Human POW. Brb off to launch my new blockchain.

Girl, give them ELIZA, they won't even notice.

Bring back lightbox!

I am so sick of monkey-see monkey-do in business.

I mostly agree but some recent experiences with voice chat bots give me pause:

Fedex has now a voice bot when you call and it is kind of good and fast. I mean faster than navigating their website. It picks up directly after some boilerplate. It can understand me.

With website chatbots we could have similar leaps if they are done well and have access to CRM/ERP etc. to actually help you.