Photo by Hannah WeiInterview
Jet Cooper shared a lot of the same values
and long-term ambitions, which is what
eventually made sharing the plans for
acquisition far less stressful.”
Ho then helped scale and develop the
UX practice of Shopify Toronto and, when
the company acquired Kit in 2016, he
started doing the same for that team. “It
wasn’t too long before I fell in love with
the product, its potential to change
merchants’ lives and the new UX
challenges it came with,” he says. “In
January 2017, I packed up my life in
Toronto and moved to San Francisco to
focus on building Kit.”
A little over 40 people now work on the
chatbot, spanning the disciplines of
product, UX, engineering and support.
Ho’s team, however, is made up of just
one senior designer, soon to be joined by
a senior content strategist – a massive
change from his time in Toronto, during
which time he came to manage a team of
- “It was part of the appeal to move to
the Kit team,” Ho explains. “After many
years of serving in more managerial
capacities, I was itching to reconnect with
my craft and get much closer to the
product. It’s a joy to be able to build a UX
team from scratch again and contribute
to Shopify’s UX practice as a whole, while
still getting my hands dirty with design
and content work on a daily basis.”
Currently, Ho spends the majority of
his time managing the content strategy
for Kit and its related products. Defining
the tone and voice standards and writing
the dialogue that defines Kit’s
conversational experiences have become
a recent passion (prompting Ho to write
a talk about conversational design, which
he will debut at Pixel Pioneers Bristol on
7 June). It all begins with understanding
the person on the other end of the
conversation. “We’ve been able to develop
an in-depth understanding of our
merchants through diary studies, usability
testing, store visits and other research
techniques,” Ho explains. “We also use
data to better understand how our
merchants use Shopify, what tasks they
struggle with, what features they use most
and more. All of this helps us paint a
clearer picture of the merchants we work
to serve.”
This information is used to choose
conversational language for Kit that not
only resonates with the merchants but
also makes concepts more accessible to
them. Writing for the appropriate reading
grade level, carrying a business casual
tone and remaining clear but concise are
some of the ways Kit conversations are
written to build productive and
trustworthy working relationships.
Ho has also helped develop best
practices for common conversational
patterns, covering everything from how
to write effective greetings to appropriate
emoji usage. Ultimately, compared to a
standard user interface, Kit’s
conversations need to be action-oriented,
require as little input as possible and be
simpler and more efficient. But there arealso similarities: in any UI you need to
consider what should be communicated,
what’s a distraction and what requires
input to help the user achieve the task at
hand. “Respecting the action-reaction
relationship between the user and the
product in a fluid, considerate and
intuitive way is what makes an interaction
conversational,” Ho says.
As technology advances, there’s a
tendency to assume that chatbots or AI-
centric conversational experiences are
perfectly flexible and can accept any
command in any format at any given time.
However, Ho warns that open-ended
models don’t always create the desired
effect for the end user.
“The first challenge is the risk of user
error,” he explains. “In most consumer