Why this smartphone maker is our model for conversational UI

At Kip, we’re huge fans of Xiaomi (小米). It’s surprising to some, since Xiaomi is known for their hardware and we make cute shopping chatbots. So why do we hold them as examples for building conversational UI and chat commerce?

One of the biggest problems in conversational commerce, or chatbots in general is the lack of real working public products to take direction from. As in any emerging field in early stages, user adoption is a fuzzy field of opportunities and experimentation.

Most of our peers have been looking at messaging platforms for direction in designing commerce-for-chat. Connie Chan’s essay on WeChat as a messaging portal and her pointed remarks on tap vs chat, and Dan Grover’s skepticism on conversational UI are starting points on this. At Kip, we have our own reservations on whether the WeChat model would work in US.

What is lacking though, is the voice of commerce. However you slice it as mobile commerce, e-commerce, conversational commerce — at the end of day, it’s commerce. That means you have an inventory stocked with products trying to sell to customers who will buy these products at different price points. Sales = availability + perceived value.

Messaging platforms, be it Messenger, Kik, Slack or iMessage, are basically shopping channels for potential customers to browse and compare products, and buy at their preferred price point.

Therefore the model for conversational commerce shouldn’t be the messaging platform, but rather how retailers connect with customers in a new way.

Xiaomi is a good example of how the e-commerce works on mobile in an inventive, clever way.

How a Software startup turned Hardware

While Xiaomi is most known for its hardware, at the core, it’s a software startup. The startup’s CEO and founding team all have software backgrounds, and its first product, the MIUI (Me-You-I), was a modified version of the Android OS.

The early versions of MIUI was basically performance tuning. Things like making apps open faster, making the interactions like tap and swipe more responsive and extending the battery life. On an individual level, it was all very small, incremental changes but taken as a whole it improved the user experience enormously.

MIUI became popular among a small set of power-users who were interested enough to download novelties, and had the technical knowledge to install and run customized OS on their devices where MIUI replaced whatever the default Android was for Samsung, Nexus, HTC etc.

Xiaomi not only solicited feedback heavily from these early adopters, but took them on and paid them as consultants. If you installed MIUI on your phone, they would “retweet” on Weibo your experience to gain free publicity i.e. “I just installed MIUI, my phone became much more easy to use immediately…very handsome [interface].”*

As the company grew, they invested heavily on creating their own feedback tools, where every interaction from installation to weekly updates was a channel for user feedback. User feedback not only helped them improve their products, but is a marketing tool for social proof.

Lead User Innovation

In 1986, MIT economist Eric von Hippel coined the term “lead user” describing how a certain group of users that face similar/general problems that isn’t addressed by the market, and given a solution, they would benefit the most from. In modern day startup-speak, these are the users with highest “pain points”.

Lead Users, source

Lead Users process isn’t normally used in consumer products. The process is considered too lengthy for go-to-market delivery, too difficult to identify which consumer needs was broad enough to be worth doing and not suited to tech which is full of secretive algorithms and IPs.

Xiaomi changed all this, and brought Lead User innovation into smartphones. Lei Jun, the founder, estimates that 1/3 of all Xiaomi features are from feedback/requests and often credits users as co-designers for MI-UI.

Continuous Improvement

Pokémon evolution, via BogdanVII

The key to understanding Xiaomi’s user-led design is that it doesn’t have one “killer feature” that all users love.

There is nothing on a MIUI that you can’t do on another smartphone, nothing that sets it apart from a tech defensibility standpoint. What Xiaomi does, and does right — is making something just good enough and promising to make the next update better.

These small incremental updates are released weekly on Friday. A Xiaomi-branded orange screen pops up to tell users what to expect, feedback is gathered over the weekend and bug fixes are made by Tuesday. It’s astonishing because it happens every week. For a user, this feels magical to have your feedback have a real impact that you can see on your own device as well as all the 70m + devices loaded with MIUI. As of today, they’ve done over 250 updates.

What Bot Designers can learn from Xiaomi

1. Launch fast and prioritize

It’s the early, giddy days of bot development and it’s very difficult to be restrained. As developers, we want to build all features for everyone. It’s better to launch fast and quietly, so that you can stagger your product improvements without worrying about churn or hard adoption cliffs. When you start, your user pool should be small enough to hold in a hand. Xiaomi’s method of continuos improvement and iteration helped shape their roadmap and prioritize users above all.

2. Have the tools to analyze feedback

In order to make sense of all the feedback, you need to have tools that allow you to measure what users really want. So far bot development is still very early, and it’s very difficult to get much metrics from send/receive APIs. However, bots are one of the few softwares that active participation is encouraged — instead of waiting for a user response, initiate the conversation first.

3. User trust == User loyalty

Transparency is important. If you are heavily soliciting feedback, you must ensure that all feedback you get is responded in the right channels, otherwise the person will feel that their opinions are not valued and won’t bother giving you feedback again. Building user trust creates a loop of loyalty, which ensures recurring use and engagement. Always keep them updated on latest developments so they feel in-the-know about your product.