Design

Expert Analysis: OfferUp's Design Director on In-App Chat & AI Defining the Next Decade

In 2017, start-up darling OfferUp, fresh off a $130 million round of funding that set the company’s valuation over $1 billion, was moving into a new 70,000-square-foot office near Seattle to accommodate a rapidly growing employee headcount. And the company needed some new furniture. Luckily, it knew just the place to look, eventually outfitting the
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7 min read

Stream Expert: Designing Best-in-Class Customer Support Live Chat Experiences

“Live chat,” as Stream recently wrote, “lets participants skip formalities and get right to the point.” In keeping with this spirit, we’ll do just that. But, first, some quick scene-setting: as a follow-up to our best practices overview for Sales & Customer Service (and what better time than now, the holiday season?) we sat down
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7 min read

What Can We Learn From In-App Chat to Improve Onboarding UX?

Americans send and receive an average of 94 text messages per day. If we’re awake for 16 hours each day, that comes to 5.8 texts an hour, or just less than one every ten waking minutes. And though these text messages stats don’t include in-app chat — communication among people on third-party apps, such as
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5 min read

Exploring Livestream Chat UX: Threads and Replies

Throughout its regular season, Major League Baseball selects a “game of the week” to broadcast live on YouTube. Along with streaming the game, viewers can participate in or read the accompanying chat. Slow-moving by nature, baseball produces its share of lulls, and it is those times between pitches or innings that make for good browsing
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5 min read

7 UX Best Practices for Livestream Chat

In its simplest form, livestream chat is a real-time message board whose participants are communicating in the moment. The practice has gained significant popularity over the last several years — and is accelerating during the last six months —with apps like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitch, and Periscope all adopting the experience within their platforms. Live
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10 min read

In-App Chat Messaging UI/UX Impact

Adding chat to your application has traditionally been a rather complicated process. Most of the early direct messaging with chat were handled by dedicated third party applications like AOL Instant Messenger. The internet thrived early on because it made messaging your friends, receiving news, building communities through private or group chat rooms easy and quick
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8 min read

Chatbots: The Future of Customer Service

Chatbots provide an automated conversational interface that can positively impact your business. Imagine a customer calls a support center, and they're stuck waiting to get a simple question answered. Not only do customers get frustrated, but having human beings respond to each call is difficult and challenging to scale. Chatbots are where the conversational UI
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4 min read