Shopify Plus Migration

The team faced a tricky task when creating a new admin hierarchy for store management within an organization. Contrary to the logical perspective where an organization should be overseen at a higher, more encompassing level than a store, the current setup involved managing an organization's settings from within a store. The team had to rethink the hierarchy to ensure a user-friendly and logically sound experience.

The Shopify admin settings consisted of 3 layers - account, organization, and store. This visual hierarchy was established in order to create guiding principles for where settings features should be built and stored.

Creating a diagram to visually lay out the page content and structure between two overlapping pages. This audit helped eliminate duplications and ensured a smooth migration of the org admin into the store admin.

The Store Details page contained a mix of customer-facing and admin-specific information, leading to a confusing user experience and increased cognitive load. To align with our guiding principles, I conducted a content audit to identify content types and placement, then recommended a more suitable page hierarchy.

An example of iterative design to introduce the concept of switching between stores within a single organization. We explored the best placement of the store switcher within the Shopify Admin as well as refined its style and determined its key action items.

This exercise focused on deconstructing content that lives on one of the pages we were migrating. I investigated its current state and anticipated future state (when additional features are added), documenting my questions, comments, suggestions, and a summary with rationale. The goal was to make an informed decision that would ensure the page content and name remain relevant and future-proofed.

Writing effective microcopy comes with its challenges. This CTA exploration exercise required simplifying the navigation mental model, and accommodating space constraint. In a small area, I had to convey to users that they can navigate to standalone stores, organization-specific stores, or switch to a different organization within their account. The goal was to minimize cognitive load, utilize icons, and communicate clearly and concisely.

The behavior of the Shopify admin varies depending on a user's access and permissions. To gain insights into different user types and the messaging they receive, I developed three archetypes. These archetypes outline the user journeys, characteristics, admin interface visibility, touchpoints, and any outstanding questions for each user type.