
Ask HN: Need your opinion–what would you use this for? - giordanobd
Hey there!<p>Over the past month I built a service that allows you to see your users browse your website &#x2F; web app in real time. It&#x27;s kinda like &quot;session recording&quot; offered by various services, but live, mainly to offer support.<p>To make it easier to market I built a Chrome extension that integrates it with Intercom and other live chat services, so that when someone chats you up you can see their screen live and troubleshoot problems a lot quicker. Some early users utilize it this way.<p>However, I personally like a lot more the idea of having a &quot;monitor&quot; with say 6 screens and being able to send a message to people you see struggling, to offer &quot;proactive&quot; support.
This comes from seeing way too many of my users on other apps make dumb mistakes and seeing myself losing money after they leave frustrated. I would <i>really</i> have paid to send them a message on screen saying &quot;hey, let me know if you need help with this :)&quot;.<p>I&#x27;m not sure whether:
1. this &quot;proactive support&quot; is creepy;
2. it is scalable;
3. it only works in my mind;
4. companies would pay for it;
5. the ease of marketing something &quot;for intercom&#x2F;livechat&#x2F;...&quot; outweighs the coolness of the monitoring station.<p>What do you guys think? Would love your opinion!<p>Website is https:&#x2F;&#x2F;peekin.io&#x2F;
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jnardiello
1\. If users are NOT aware of being tracked, it is HELL creepy 2\. Scalability
is now not an issue :) I think your concern should be to find the first
customer. 3\. not sure 4\. I think they would, but you need to make sure users
are not creeped out by it. 5\. Unsure. You might want to try both ways. Start
marketing a specific use-case and see what happens (if it works, etc..).

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giordanobd
By the way, what I meant with scalability is that if you have up to say 10-15
users at a time you can keep track of them easily, if it's more you either
need more people or the whole monitoring station becomes worthless

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jnardiello
Agree but you could still easily gather events and metrics, which once
aggregated would provide BI insights. Managers do love this kind of things

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maxaf
"Proactive" desktop support is very common in larger organizations where the
time needed to personally dispatch a technician to each user in meatspace
would be prohibitive. Usually such remote proactive support is initiated with
the user's direct approval.

In my opinion the "consenting adults" principle applies here: it doesn't hurt
to ask for a user's permission, and if they agree, it's not creepy. If they
don't agree, no harm is done.

One last thing: you're right to worry about scalability. High-touch support is
fundamentally not scalable (someone please prove me wrong!), which is why you
see companies like Google providing automated "support" that makes customers
feel alienated and not valued.

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giordanobd
I get what you're saying—I guess what I'm trying to understand is whether a
regular user has an unspoken expectation that browsing or using a web app is
"private"\--in which case that expectation is already broken most of the times
by usage of analytics and, less often by session recording tech--or whether it
is like walking in a store: no one is bothering you but you know that there's
someone that might be seeing what you are doing, and if you stand in front of
an item long enough someone is gonna come over asking if you need any help.

Apps like intercom already allow you to specify "triggers" so that when the
user does something you can send them a message. I'm not sure how many people
actually realize that it is an automated message.

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maxaf
Considering how much brouhaha there has been recently in the media
(legitimately or not) regarding privacy issues, I doubt anyone expects true
privacy when using SaaS products or any old websites these days. There are
obviously those people who _really_ care about privacy, however those are a
minority and probably aren't worth worrying about in your case.

I think making this work well (assuming underlying tech is solid) is a matter
of UX technique. Iterate on a solution that makes the user aware of your
support capabilities, then make it easy to summon help. Perhaps it'll be more
natural if the user must initiate each support session, i.e. by highlighting a
section of their screen and twiddling a control which makes it clear that
human help is on the way.

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lsiunsuex
Woah! Take my money!

Though I really wish you would consider selling the software and allowing it
to be self hosted for security reasons - I think this is great!

My users really aren't the brightest (that's not to put them down; computer
savvy users just aren't my target demographic) - so it would be awesome to see
what their struggling with.

That - and for months I've been having an incredibly hard time hunting down 1
specific bug - I've setup all kinds of traps, triggers - still nothing.

Maybe if I can actually see it happen, it'll shed some light on it.

1 problem - in an AngularJS 1.x app - this is throwing a lot of JS errors. The
site is working fine with it in place - but the console has a lot of red in it
pointing to your script with no specific error message.

Message me if you wanna see for yourself.

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giordanobd
Hey there! Thank your for your feedback!

Are you seeing errors on your website or peekin.io? There are a lot of console
error on peekin.io that are due to the html being sandboxed and there is no
way around that.

Otherwise I can take a look :)

\--

As for the product itself: I'm not sure—are you saying you'd use it to watch
your user "proactively" or when they ask for support?

Thank you!

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lsiunsuex
The errors are occurring on my site, after including the script.

I intend to use the app to watch the user proactively. I have various triggers
in place that let me know when a user is on the site / what their looking at /
etc... (the usual metrics) but 1 bug continues to elude me. Letting me see
what the user is actually doing might help me find it.

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sharemywin
If a "Stuggling with X?" window came up on bottom right hand corner I might
not be as creeped out if I thought it was just help

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herbst
Its creepy. Creepy enough to never come back. I did that once and i am pretty
sure the user never came back.

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detaro
In most cases creepy, creepy enough to probably leave a site and never come
back, especially if it is things like payment details or a service where I
store data (so basically, nearly everything that is complex enough to make
this service "useful")

