Testing the AskMeGo Live Q&A Toolbar
AskMeGo is a recently launched company that aims to engage website visitors with their live Q&A toolbar. However, their plans go much further than the toolbar. AskMeGo enables publishers and their users to tap into a “distributed knowledge network.” Anyone can ask a question through the toolbar and get paired with an self-proclaimed expert in that topic for a live one to one chat, all within the toolbar. If an expert can’t be found to answer the question, the question will be posted and others can answer.
AskMeGo also ties into instant messaging services (as to be expected from a company founded by people from the Yahoo! Messenger team) to alert users when an expert they’re looking for goes online. Furthermore, questions and answers as well as chats are logged on their site, making it easy for people to browse through past questions. All of this is accessible from their homepage.
Feedback
That’s enough with the explanation. What do I actually think about AskMeGo after testing them for a while?
I’ve never used a website toolbar add-on before so it was interesting to see how user interaction would change. First off, I was impressed that it was even being used by my users at all and much more that people were asking legitimate, substantive questions like…
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Due to AskMeGo’s “distributed knowledge network”, it’s not just the website publisher’s users that interact with the toolbar - it’s every publishers’ users that align with the topics you have selected to cover on your site. I’m still up in the air about this. I really think it would be neat to just have my audience use the toolbar, as a per-site thing, to facilitate niche technical conversations amongst readers rather than having it being tied to every other tech publisher using it, which introduces a bit of “noise” with those people asking questions like “i broke my macbook charger, where can i get another.” However, for smaller publishers it makes sense to have the toolbar tie into the larger network.
Since putting the toolbar on my site recently (and also about a month ago when I was testing another version of AskMeGo), I have received a few emails about how the toolbar obstructs the website a bit and almost demands more attention than the website itself, a bad thing for publishers. While I think that may be a large part of why AskMeGo works well, I would like to see an alternate version that has a certain feedback button that on click or on hover expands to show the entire toolbar.
What do you think about this style of live Q&A?
Disclosure: AskMeGo asked me to beta test their service for them, and as a courtesy I wrote this post to help describe some of my thoughts on their service.
I would agree with those people who emailed you saying it seems to shout louder than your site does. You have a strong identity here but when you first land the bar at the bottom grabs attention away from the post as well as from your logo/header area.
I didn’t use it as I didn’t know what it was, my first thought was a Facebook style chat, and now you’ve explained it I likely won’t use it.
Interesting one. At first I didn’t really understand concept because toolbar on site doesn’t load in Opera, had to switch to Firefox to take a look.
I agree that it probably works exactly because it is intrusive. :)
They are out of beta? I don’t see any beta signs on site. Might try it at my blog.
Their clear aping of facebook chat, and that massive yellow button screams cheap website, not the usually clean style you have achieved. Askmego needs to offer the ability to style the toolbar with your own stylesheet.
I will return to reading this site exclusively via RSS as long as it’s here.
The toolbar is ridiculously ugly, so I’d never install it (and am tempted not to even click it) personally…
Hey guys, thanks for your feedback. For full disclosure I have been working on user interaction design and usability research for AskMeGo this summer.
Phil, I think you are spot on that AskMeGo should not distract users and should be more tightly integrated with Paul’s content eg the bubble can feature relevant information from the post. Sometimes people have questions that are inspired from blog content but don’t necessarily warrant a comment. Rather than encouraging people into a forum, which is potentially a bigger distraction, we want to help people find what they’re looking for through meaningful conversations (instantly if possible).
Rarst, we work with Firefox 2 & 3, Safari 3, and IE 7 (but not in quirks mode). Shoot me an email (enrique.allen @ gmail.com) if you want to chat about trialing it on your blog- Live Q&A is free and our focus is making you all happy. We removed the bubble last week to test and our questions dropped .2%.
Camron, great point- we’re an engineer heavy startup that would love to meet some design hot shots. Maybe we should do something similar to Wufoo in terms of UG stylesheet customization?
James, fair enough- I like hot looking girls too :)
Let me know if you have more questions/feedback, I love learning.
Thank you,
Enrique
EnriqueAllen.com
twitter.com/EnriqueAllen
Shame, it doesnt work on Chrome ^^
I have to agree with the others : the toolbar isnt very beautiful. Its too big and looks like Facebook’s one.
Also I think that translating the app to some other languages ( for i.e my french readers wont like english so much ) might contribute to the success of your website.
Again, I totally get the fact that you just launched the service and that all those things do take time ;-)
Gonzague
I forgot to add : brilliant idea anyway :-)
Enrique,
I think that’s a good way to approach it.
thanks for your response.
Gonzague, you’re absolutely right- we should be thinking international. Merci!