ecomm
onboarding

Despite Shopify's user-friendly interface and despite being arguably the biggest e-commerce platform available, I found that many small business owners still had trouble optimizing their digital stores.
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In a 3-week sprint, I redesigned its onboarding product to provide new users with a comprehensive set of personalized recommendations. The goal was to empower entrepreneurs to take control of their business by introducing goal-oriented strategies and surfacing helpful tools on Shopify.

For this project I followed a modified version of the Google Ventures Sprint framework to quickly research, prototype, and validate my idea.

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Mapping the Problem

I interviewed 9  Shopify users about their growth strategies and behaviors on Shopify. These qualitative interviews led to the following opportunities:

• How might we inform new users of best practices for e-commerce and for the web?
• How might we represent data and analytics more effectively?
• How might we provide relevant next steps quickly?

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Selecting a Target Moment and Opportunity

The Research step was the biggest blocker of the user experience, often leading to unreliable results with little support.

Ideation & Storyboarding

Users valued the existing Onboarding Modal on their dashboard because it gave them jump off points to action quickly, but felt stalled after completing the Shopify setup tasks.

After taking a brief questionnaire to quickly define the business owner’s goals, interests, and experience, users are taken to an expanded Onboarding Modal that provides personalized insights based on their responses. This leverages an existing and well-used feature that Shopify users are already familiar with but increases its value by expanding its offerings and tailoring its recommendations to each business.

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Measuring with a Success Criteria

I defined hypotheses to guide and test my design solution:

• Users trust recommendations that are more tailored to their business
• Users feel more informed and confident about the next steps to take
• Users find these insights easily accessible

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Planning a successful solution

I storyboarded the user flow to identify key moments in the prototype:

1. User compares e-commerce platforms
2. User on landing page
3. User creates an account
4. User finds the Growth Plan Questionnaire on the Dashboard
5. User answers a brief questionnaire  
6. User reviews the revised Onboarding Modal
7. User browses through the different tabs and tasks
8. User actions the recommendations in other areas of Shopify (ie. the App Store)

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User-declared data

Shopify can rely heavily on user-declared data to generate personalized action items. Not all users may want to use this feature so instead of forcing users to manage unsolicited tasks that might not apply to them, I added this feature by opt-in only.

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Building on effective UI patterns

Since the existing Onboarding Modal proved to be a valuable feature to users, I sought to leverage and add value instead of replacing. I used existing patterns as much as possible to create a familiar experience consistent with the rest of Shopify.

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Accessible and credible

Because the product needed to be easily accessible, I kept the questionnaire brief with only 7 questions and added a progress bar to encourage completion. The content needed to build a certain level of trust so users can confidently implement these recommendations, but I also wanted to emphasize the value of a focused, goal-oriented strategy, user testing, and a holistic understanding of the bigger picture.

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Relevant and actionable

The content needed to strike a balance between practice and theory to provide just enough information to make users feel comfortable enough to take action. I curated from Shopify’s Help Center and updated the text to form a concise introduction of each item’s benefits and potential applications. It was important to provide two actions: a primary button to enact the recommendation, and a secondary link leading to additional information.

Anticipating concerns regarding how Shopify is able to make these suggestions, I added a caption at the bottom of each card that provides the basis for each action item, as well as the ability to opt-out or remove the card from the panel if users choose.

I identified, screened, and interviewed target users in 45-60 minute sessions using a research script to get unbiased feedback.

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Users established a baseline and valued the suggested tasks as directional insights.

Users felt like they established a baseline for their store with the understanding that similar businesses are doing the same thing, and felt empowered by new things to try instead of taking a “scattershot in the dark.”

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Users suggested making it a permanent feature with its own page.

100% of users requested to see more recommendations (but I didn’t have time to create that many… 😂) and “would use it over and over again” as their businesses evolved.

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User Testing Takeaways

I validated my hypotheses and identified insights to inform my next steps.

Reduce cognitive load to create a more constructive and rewarding experience.

While they valued establishing baseline steps and broadening their expectations of the platform, they also acknowledged feeling like they have “a lot of work to do.”

Find better ways to integrate this feature within Shopify’s larger ecosystem.

Users experienced some friction navigating to the modal after they completed a task.  Some tasks are more difficult to complete than others - how does this product fit into that workflow? What other use cases should we account for?

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