Bars get used, bubbles get ignored
Why a corner chat widget gets one or two percent engagement and a search bar in the hero gets used.
Not filmed yet
The lesson is written out below. The video comes after.
The same capability, in two different containers, performs completely differently, and the reason is not the technology.
A corner chat bubble asks people to learn a new behaviour — notice it, decide it is worth engaging, open it, trust it. Most people have been trained by a decade of aggressive widgets to ignore that corner entirely, so engagement sits at one or two percent.
A bar in the hero asks for no new behaviour at all. People have been typing into a box at the top of a page since the nineties. You are not teaching anything; you are inheriting a habit that is already there.
The bar at the top of this site is that idea, built. It is a real search over everything here, and it logs the questions that come back empty.
The one thing to keep
Hijack thirty years of trained behaviour instead of inventing new behaviour.
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