At Tars, we use a lot of images and gifs in our bots. We believe they make the chat flows more engaging, thus increasing our conversion rates and more importantly, they make the chat experience more natural for the user (because humans use gifs and images in everyday chats). So to double down on our belief in rich content we are enhancing the image/gif experience in Tars bots.

Specifically we have added an image/gif zoom feature.

How does it work?

Sometimes, a bot sends an image or a gif to a user and the details or text in the image is too small for the user to read (especially on phones). Now, users can simply tap on the image to zoom into it and click back to return to the chat:


How image zoom works on mobile

How image zoom works on desktop when you open the bot link directly

Why is this important?

Sometimes simple text might not be the best way of presenting information. For example, if you send an xkcd comic to the user to make them laugh, the text could be too small for them to read without a zoom.


That is where the image zoom comes into play:


But what are the practical uses of this?

In many cases like lead generation bots, explainers etc., it is important to keep your user engaged to increase conversions, so funny comics and gifs are practical for bot makers.

Past this, however, some forms of information are more intuitively displayed as an image than plain text. Think about a receipt or a ticket. Such forms of information might have information written in small text that a user might have to access.

So what do you think? Did we miss anything? Do you like the feature?

Let us know through the bot below (where, you can incidentally try the image zoom feature): https://imagezoom.hellotars.com/conv/Hy6gaq/

https://upscri.be/973f3c/