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ChatID
Designing Chatbar: Human Expertise at Scale
First in-house designer, Product leadership, Collaboration with founders
Position
Lead Designer
In Short
Joined as the 8th employee and first in-house designer. Established design and product practices from scratch, shipped a product that the biggest US online retailers actually wanted on their sites, and scaled Chatbar to help millions of shoppers get expert answers at the moment of purchase. Acquired by Salsify in late 2018.
Shoppers using Chatbar were more likely to convert, and this allowed Chatbar to get deployed across Walmart, Target, and Newegg among other online retailers, connecting 50+ brands with millions of people.
When I joined ChatID as their first in-house designer in 2013, shoppers faced a fundamental problem: they had lots of questions and retailer sites relied on slow to update FAQs and product specifications, making them ill-equipped to answer accurately. Our original proof of concept worked and gave us the backing we needed from our investors, but it was ages away from being a product with shoppers in mind.
This was the start of a journey that allowed me to hone my skills as a designer, fueled my growth as a product leader, and made me fall in love with the fast-paced environment that gritty startups foster.
Understanding How to Make It Better
In the early days we had no users, but we needed to keep moving. At the start, as a way for me to get educated I chose to engage with internal interviews, and later these interviews evolved into a workflow to recruit participants from Craigslist as a way to help me better understand how people shopped and how chat could play a role in their behaviors.
Not long after, a trend started to form as one topic came up over and over: People are used to having a store associate and asking questions directly. This in many cases was a brand representative posted at the store promoting a new product.
We understood that our experience had to look legitimate and feel native to the sites where we lived, while still representing the brands available on each retailer's site. Our early insights gave way to some core design principles we agreed to follow:
- Respect the retailer's environment, we're guests, not owners
- Surface naturally at moments of need, not constantly
- Every interaction should justify our presence with value
Our original technical demo soon started to transform into Chatbar, and with our first deployment being in Newegg, we began to not only transform how shoppers behaved during a shopping session but also to understand what they needed.
Proactive chat call-to-action based on user's behavior
Learning and Adapting from Actual Users
With real data coming our way, we finally had the facts that helped validate our design principles and our product strategy. As we continued to grow and evolve the product, and our processes, we started to build based on user needs and the needs of the industry. This led us to developing features to capture feedback and helped us reveal our true impact: shoppers who engaged with brand experts were 3x more likely to complete a purchase.
This meant we needed to be present where shoppers were, which gave us our next big iteration: bringing the chat experience to mobile-web. After many iterations and what felt like all the usability sessions we could have run, Chatbar Mobile was ahead of its time and allowed users to use similar interactions as the ones in desktop, but as an interactive layer on top of their shopping window.
One last significant moment during our growth era was when a partnership with Target appeared and presented the opportunity to get Chatbar into target.com. One of their requirements soon became our main focus as a product and design organization: WCAG AA compliance, which meant rethinking every interaction pattern. Screen reader compatibility, keyboard controls and others were no longer just a detail but a core aspect of the experience.
We read, learned and began iterating to ensure our product was accessible, and it was our savvy approach to user testing that led us to partner with the Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library that allowed us to understand users that are often forgotten.
All these big moments of change across technology and user experience allowed us to continue speeding up the process of partnering with new retailers and brands that wanted to be present on retail channels, and by the end of 2018, ChatID was acquired by Salsify.
Chatbar had matured into a robust product, and its wide adoption across these leading retailers played a key role in accelerating Salsify's Enhanced Content expansion after the acquisition.
Long Term Learnings
ChatID shaped my skills and my mindset as a product leader and designer. I learned deep empathy for contact center workers and frontline agents, which would influence my later move to Balto. I fell in love with startups and built a solid foundation of who I am as a designer and how my curiosity can be an asset to push a company forward.
The E-Commerce Transformation (2013-2018)
E-commerce growth and the critical mobile shift that shaped Chatbar's evolution
Insight
Shoppers who engaged with experts showed dramatically different shopping patterns, browsing more products, asking deeper questions, and making more confident purchases
3x
higher conversion rate when brand experts were available
34%
reduction in cart abandonment when chat was present
20%
fewer returns due to better-informed purchases