Convention is a feature
Two decades of the web have taught visitors that chat lives in the bottom-right corner. A launcher in a creative location is not distinctive — it is invisible, because nobody looks for it there. Spend your creativity on the words and the timing; keep the location boring.
Words beat icons
A bare bubble icon tests worse than a labeled button, because a label answers the visitor's actual question: is this a human, a bot, or a mailto? "Chat with us" sets the expectation; "Questions? We're online" adds state; "Leave a message" honestly reframes the offline hours. Match the label to reality — a button that says "we're online" over an unstaffed queue burns exactly the trust chat exists to build.
Mobile: the hard mode
- Stay off the thumb path. Bottom-right on mobile collides with floating action buttons, cookie bars, and the visitor's own scroll thumb. Keep the launcher small (a circle, not a bar) and respect the safe-area insets on notched phones.
- Never cover the primary action. A launcher squatting on the Add-to-Cart or Submit button costs more revenue than chat recovers. Audit your key templates at 375px width — the launcher must not overlap the one thing each page exists for.
- Expanded = full attention. When the panel opens on a phone, half-measures fail: a desktop-width panel clipped by the viewport is unusable. Full-screen (or viewport-clamped) expanded chat is correct on mobile even though it feels heavy on desktop.
Share the corner politely
Your launcher is rarely alone down there: cookie consents, back-to-top buttons, and accessibility overlay tools all claim the same corner. The widget should detect neighbors and give ground rather than stacking on top or — worse — fighting them for pixels. (MyLiveChat's widget yields to accessibility-tool repositioning for exactly this reason.) If your site runs several floaters, assign the corner deliberately instead of letting five scripts negotiate by force.
Design: on-brand, but legible first
- Brand color on the launcher is right — as long as label contrast stays readable (4.5:1). Legibility outranks palette.
- One attention animation on first load is plenty. A launcher that bounces forever trains visitors to ignore it — or to close it on sight.
- The unread badge is your strongest attention tool: quiet until there is genuinely something new, unmistakable when there is.
The five-minute audit
Open your three most important pages on a phone: can you read the label, tap the launcher with a thumb, complete the page's primary action with chat closed, and use the full chat when open? Then load your slowest page: does the launcher's arrival shove content around? Fix what failed, in that order. In MyLiveChat, position, offsets, size, and label are per-site settings under Deployment — test variations without touching code.