Verne Ho

We caught up with Shopify’s director of UX to discover exactly how he helps build virtual assistant Kit and find out the most important lessons that he’s learned about the process of designing successful conversational interfaces

- Oliver Lindberg

Verne Ho loves making things that enables others to make things. It’s the common thread running through all the projects he’s involved in. “Education and empowerment are a deeply rooted passion of mine,” he explains. “I find myself constantly chasing opportunities where I can accelerate more creative ambitions. If the impact of my work stops simply at me, I tend to lose motivation.”

Most recently this purpose has been focused on Kit, Shopify’s virtual assistant (www.shopify.co.uk/kit). It helps merchants, especially smaller ones, free up time by taking care of complex tasks on their behalf. Merchants effectively hire Kit to join their team to manage parts of their business they either don’t have the expertise, staff or interest to take on themselves.

“One of the areas that Kit specialises in is marketing,” Ho points out by way of an example. “This is one of the biggest hurdles for our merchants to overcome, so Kit helps by distilling down the tasks of creating Facebook ads, social posts and email campaigns to a few simple questions like what products they’d like to promote and how much they would like to spend. Everything else, it intelligently optimises for the merchant. Kit can also proactively recommend tasks for the merchant, such as fixing a broken link or promoting a new review, which typically only require a ‘yes’ to execute. This also includes tasks the merchant may not even have thought of, like running an ad when a product category is trending or sending a personalised ‘thank you’ email to a repeat customer.”