Announcements

📢 Important Announcement: Discontinuation of Chat UI 📢

📢 Important Announcement: Discontinuation of Chat UI 📢
Karine
Rank
Userlevel 2

Happy May, Typeformers! With a new month comes new announcements, and with heavy hearts, we are depreciating Chat UI. What began as an internal experiment blossomed into a new type of interaction for your respondents. While we’ve loved having many of you utilize Chat UI in your businesses, we haven’t found it increasing your response rates as we’d like. 

 

Here’s everything you need to know about Chat UI sunsetting:

 

The why

There are a few reasons why we’ve decided to part ways with the Chat UI. The most important reason is that we’ve found low usage and completion rates for those who have turned their Typeforms into the Chat UI. Additionally, the Chat UI wasn’t able to support various features we know you love, like the Calendly integration or payments. 

 

Important dates

You’ll be receiving communications from us over the next few months, but here are some important dates you need to know: 

 

May 2nd-9th: We will inform all customers that currently use the Chat UI feature about the upcoming changes via email.

 

June 6-13th: All forms using Chat UI will be reverted back to the Typeform UI, including any embedded forms. 
 

Actions you’ll need to take

Thankfully, we’ve made this switch as easy as possible for you. If you’d like to revert your forms before June, you can switch the toggle off like this: 

 

 

Any forms with the chat remaining after June 6th will automatically be reverted back to the Typeform UI. There will be no change to the code for embedded forms, including those using the Embed SDK. 

 

We hope this explains everything you need to know about our sunset of the Chat UI, but if you have any questions at all, please post them here. 

 

We’ve updated the date in which we will discontinue chat. Please take a peek at the post here for further information. 

 

60 replies

T
Userlevel 3

Ah, this makes sense from your standpoint, but the chat feature is the exact reason why we signed up! 

It works perfectly in our use-case


Sad to hear :(

T
Userlevel 2

We had fantastic results with our chat. Personally, I think it's better to let users decide if it's not converting than to remove it without their input. Typeform gives us great data to evaluate the chat's effectiveness in detail. 

 

Since Typeform is such an customer first and responsive brand, I was surprised to see them remove the chat without polling its usefulness. A nice poll could have been made using, ummm, TYPEFORM. This does raise questions about whether this was the true reason for removal.

Is there a way to stop the depreciation folks at Typeform?

S
Userlevel 2

Yes, this is also why we upgraded our account permissions. Chat has been converting very well for us on the few forms we have optimized for this feature. I am glad we didn’t go 100% all in on this tool (as we had planned to re-write all of our forms to optimize for chat in Q3) so we didn’t waste too much time on this. Oh well, now I know we can downgrade our account again… one less thing to pay for.

W
Userlevel 1

We’ve been working on building out a whole set of Typeforms using the chat feature… it was central to our use case unfortunately so we’re super disappointed to see this. Is there any way at all to keep it? Or do we have to find this somewhere else now?

C
Userlevel 2
Badge

Oh no.. bad move. Aren’t you paying attention to the emergence of AI chatbots. Instead of removing chat, make it more intelligent like while responding to the lead gen. question, the prospective customer might ask, “oh tell me more about this product, or your company”… you get the idea. Wrong move. We suggest you stop and go in the other direction. We are going to be looking at other solutions. 

Liz
Rank
Userlevel 7
Badge +5

@Tailwind Totally get it. 😓 I’m sad to see it go, too, but I know it’s so we can make way for better features! 

@tajadojo If you don’t mind sharing the results you’ve had with your chats, @Karine will see them and I can also pass them to the product team to share. We do know there are a few folks out there that have had great success with it (like you!) but it wasn’t enough as our regular form interface to justify keeping the Chat UI. 

@scmcgo if you don’t mind sharing your results data, I’m happy to pass it to product! 

@waterlust we don’t have plans to keep it at this point, but do you mind sharing more about your use case? 

@Conceivian team Yes, actually! Our research and development team is working on a new feature that utilizes AI in a conversational way (even more than the Chat UI) to create a better respondent experience. You can read more about some of those experiments here. 

Life is a series of awkward moments separated by snacks.
P

This is very unfortunate, we have been offering to multiple clients and with good results. 
 

dokuniev
Rank
Userlevel 2

 

@Tailwind @tajadojo @scmcgo @waterlust @Conceivian team 


My name is David Okuniev. I run a small innovation team here at Typeform called Typeform Labs.

We’re working on a new product called “formless”. Formless elevates data collection through engaging, natural conversations, powered by AI.

It’s very early days and we still have a few weeks until we launch the beta (during ~Q3), but you can get at least get a feel for the product and sign up for the beta in the link below.

https://formless.ai

Here is another an example conversation on formless….
https://formless.ai/c/pPwTmaNmatRz

Would love to know what you all think? And BTW, although we can’t let you in quite yet, but we can give you a live demo right now if you are interested. 

@Liz Could you make sure we contact all the customers above to get them first access to formless once we launch the beta? Or if anyone is interested in an early demo.

David Okuniev
 

T
Userlevel 2

@Liz @dokuniev This looks seriously amazing. Thank you for the offer for first access. Yes, pretty please-I would love early access. Thank you! You see, I knew the folks at Typeform were customer centric. So really, chat is being replace by @dokuniev AI innovation magic. Now that I can get behind.

dokuniev
Rank
Userlevel 2

@tajadojo That’s great to hear. I’m sorry about the outcome with ChatUi….I guess with everything that dies something is re-born.

C
Userlevel 2
Badge

Listen to your customers. Don’t kill it. We switched to chat format two months ago from Squarespace forms and our leadgen has 300% improved. Bring those ai experiments you are talking about to improve it, not kill it. That is not how you serve your customers by disrupting their business and calling it product management. When switching to chat format, you have to change prompts. You are not guiding may be some customers about that so they are experiencing incompletion rates. So fix the problem at the root. Improve your user help, and bring ai into this game. Here is a case study https://conceivian.com/tpc. Notice how the prompts are in a humanized voice, “What is your name?” not in a machine voice e.g. Name.  

C
Userlevel 2
Badge

@dokuniev https://formless.ai is great. Could we get access, please? 

We currently use chat format, so killing it would disrupt our experience. Consider holding on killing it till you have the new beta to offer to people with business workflows that depend on chat. That would be responsible stewardship of customers businesses. If you do something today that disrupts my business, how would I trust you with your next offer. To be part of business workflows you have to be dependable. This does not look dependable. 

Dana
Userlevel 3
Badge +2

Hi @Liz can I be added to the list for first access to Formless. Thanks. 

Dana
C

@dokuniev https://formless.ai is great. Could we get access, please? 

We currently use chat format, so killing it would disrupt our experience. Consider holding on killing it till you have the new beta to offer to people with business workflows that depend on chat. That would be responsible stewardship of customers businesses. If you do something today that disrupts my business, how would I trust you with your next offer. To be part of business workflows you have to be dependable. This does not look dependable. 

I could not agree more. The same day I find out my ChatBot form is being deprecated, I login to see an advert for “Introducing Typeform Labs! 🧪 Our testing ground for AI-powered products.”. Why would I try this when Typeform is so willing to deprecate a feature I spent many hours on? At least have something in place in lieu of what you are removing. I just demonstrated the my ChatForm to a client the other day, who loved it, and now I have to say it is no longer available. Does not seem like ethical business practice.

Sincerely,

Kevin

C

@Tailwind Totally get it. 😓 I’m sad to see it go, too, but I know it’s so we can make way for better features! 

@tajadojo If you don’t mind sharing the results you’ve had with your chats, @Karine will see them and I can also pass them to the product team to share. We do know there are a few folks out there that have had great success with it (like you!) but it wasn’t enough as our regular form interface to justify keeping the Chat UI. 

@scmcgo if you don’t mind sharing your results data, I’m happy to pass it to product! 

@waterlust we don’t have plans to keep it at this point, but do you mind sharing more about your use case? 

@Conceivian team Yes, actually! Our research and development team is working on a new feature that utilizes AI in a conversational way (even more than the Chat UI) to create a better respondent experience. You can read more about some of those experiments here. 

Liz, with all due respect, I think the process by which you are deprecating the feature is the main problem. It feels like you are pulling the rug out from our feet. Customers will lose confidence in future features because you may deprecate them just as you have the ChatForm feature.

Sincerely,

Kevin

dokuniev
Rank
Userlevel 2

@Conceivian team formless is not ready to ship yet unfortunately, but of course we can get you in early as soon as its ready (e.t.a July).

I appreciate the predicament you are in and on reflection, I should have been a little more considerate of the continuity issue that this will cause. Deprecating a feature is never good for a customer that is using it heavily.

Have you considered testing in the meantime with the normal Typeform UI on the same URL and just adapting the wording slightly if needed?

 

Dana
Userlevel 3
Badge +2

hi @dokuniev with chat UI it was part of the typeform plans with pricing. Is the thinking Formless would be included in the typeform plan I pay for or a separate product entirely with its on pricing? 

Dana
C
Userlevel 2
Badge

@dokuniev Thank you for acknowledging. No worries. Best of us makes mistakes and take a big man to own it. We love Typeform and yes, please give us access as soon as you can to formless.ai. We will instantly turn it on throughout our site and you can see it in action. We love this vision and we will help you make it better. In the meantime we will adjust to formal application style. 

B

Nooo, this is so sad! I wish we would’ve known about this earlier.

Do any of you know of any alternatives?

Ever since this was released it, we’ve moved away from pushing customers into Messenger flows, and it has been a core element in most of our campaigns - giving us a way to interact with our customers in a personal and human-to-human way - and giving our brand a face. It was so seamless!

We’ve probably had more than 50.000 through our chat flows.

We have data showing that when you’re having a limited drop (we’re a DTC jewelry brand) with a shut down website and a password to enter - then if you have a short chat-interaction (all scripted and less than 20 seconds) about the launch after they’ve put in their password and before letting them in, we’re able to increase total revenue by 16% (seen on more than 4000 purchases in the test on Black Friday 2022).

A Typeform is a survey. A Chat is way to interact human-to-human with your customers, almost like texting with a friend - and it takes a specific approach to make it work well.

In a world where everything becomes less human-to-human, all algorithms and more anonymous I probably committed too much internally on this, because I believe in it. I didn’t expect this.

We’ve built so much custom around this and just finished a major rebuild of our database and Shopify setup for this last month :(

Sorry. I just had to get that off my chest. I’m honestly just very sad right now. I bet too much on this product and I can only blame myself for not knowing you had such a low adoption rate on this.

Any way for us to be able to use it for longer while we can plan for alternatives?

D

We spent months developing an innovative new Diabetes Prevention Program curriculum experience via chat and you’re just going to sunset next month!? Well, that’s incredibly painful!

M

 

@Tailwind @tajadojo @scmcgo @waterlust @Conceivian team 


My name is David Okuniev. I run a small innovation team here at Typeform called Typeform Labs.

We’re working on a new product called “formless”. Formless elevates data collection through engaging, natural conversations, powered by AI.

It’s very early days and we still have a few weeks until we launch the beta (during ~Q3), but you can get at least get a feel for the product and sign up for the beta in the link below.

https://formless.ai

Here is another an example conversation on formless….
https://formless.ai/c/pPwTmaNmatRz

Would love to know what you all think? And BTW, although we can’t let you in quite yet, but we can give you a live demo right now if you are interested. 

@Liz Could you make sure we contact all the customers above to get them first access to formless once we launch the beta? Or if anyone is interested in an early demo.

David Okuniev
 

@Liz @dokuniev Hi there! I would love to have first access to formless.ai this too as we just started using the chat feature only to find out that it is depreciated.

I

Hi @Liz, can I also be added to the list for first access to Formless please? Thanks. 

gillis

Hi there - this is really unfortunate. I’ve had good success with a very complex logic sequence directing customers through various legal and product options. Will formless be able to follow the same kind of process? Would there be any way of allowing existing Chat typeforms to remain functional until formless is an option we can use in their place?

K

This is very disappointing to hear. The reasoning does not make too much sense

MarionSM

Hi @Liz, I registered for the early access to formless.ai 
I would also appreciate to get first access. 
 
 

Marion

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