Letting Kits live in context

I added a flag-gated version of Kits that sits beside the pages where questions naturally come up, instead of asking people to leave their flow for a generic chat screen.

Kits works best when it feels like it is already looking at the same thing you are.

A separate chat destination can be useful, but adoption questions usually happen in the middle of browsing: on a dog page, while comparing providers, after seeing a price, when a detail suddenly feels important.

The surface

I added a contextual co-pilot that can sit on listing and provider pages.

On desktop, Kits rests in the corner and opens into an overlay. On mobile, it behaves more like a bottom sheet near the contact action. The shape changes by device, but the intent is the same: the assistant should feel nearby without stealing the page.

The tone

The UI needed to avoid feeling like a support widget dropped onto a product page.

I tightened the message bubbles, dimmed older context, added scroll fades, and kept the mascot present so the whole thing felt more like Wags and less like a detached chat box. The nudge is also earned: it should appear when context makes it useful, not just because the page loaded.

The guardrails

I kept it behind a flag and spent time on the boring states because chat surfaces fail loudly when they fail.

Loading, hydration, escape behavior, mobile sheet motion, terminal errors, and accessible dialog behavior all had to feel calm. The goal was a surface that could be experimented with without making the rest of the page feel experimental.