Product UX. Content Strategy. Growth Marketing.
Shopify
As the SaaS category leader in the e-commerce space, Shopify develops a variety of tools designed to make it easier for brands to sell online. Best known for their online store builder, Shopify’s full product list includes point-of-sale hardware, capital lending, and more.
I first started supporting Shopify’s Growth team as an independent contractor, before joining the Product UX team in a full-time capacity in early 2022 as a Content Designer.
Optimizing a signup questionnaire for conversion
One of the most impactful marketing projects I worked on was an improved free trial signup flow. Shopify previously had a 10-field form that new merchants needed to complete in order to unlock their free 7-day trial. However, included in those 10 fields were complicated business questions that a brand new entrepreneur looking to build an online store may not be able to answer—things like estimated annual revenue or a business address.
Working in a pod with another content designer, a product designer, a data scientist and a product manager, I revisited which information was truly critical at this stage in a new merchant’s journey and turned it into a multi-step flow that was easy to digest.
The original 10F introduced potential blockers for new merchants.
The redesigned free trial signup questionnaire was straightforward for everyone.
As we finalized content for this new signup flow experience, we embedded logic that served up or skipped related questions depending on how someone answered. This ensured that new merchants were only prompted with questions that applied to their business model, to ensure they felt qualified for a Shopify store.
The results were fascinating: despite extending the time required to complete this signup flow, we saw a 30%+ increase in completion rate. That means more merchants exploring Shopify’s features as they decide whether e-commerce is a fit for them and their business.
These questions would only appear to merchants who had expressed interest in selling through social channels or online marketplaces.
I also worked on the in-product experience related to this new signup flow, where we ensured that the information a new merchant shared was used to customize their product experience. We built a new setup guide which led merchants through simple steps to get started with each of the features they had requested throughout their onboarding. For instance, if someone indicated an interest in selling on Pinterest, the Pinterest account access steps were pre-populated in their Shopify admin.
The admin experience was fully customized based on merchants’ onboarding questionnaire answers.
Haley excels in product content (user journey mapping, UX writing, microcopy, etc.) and marketing content design (primary landing pages, email).
She’s a mobile specialist who knows exactly how to write compelling conversion copy and distill the complex into easily digestible and actionable steps.
— Lizzie MacNeill, Interim Head of Product UX, Shopify
Designing Shopify’s inaugural mobile-first homepage
The second marketing project I led was the first very Shopify homepage created specifically for a mobile audience. The ability to manage an entire online store and business from your mobile device is a huge selling feature of Shopify’s software—and yet the mobile-optimized website still spoke to a desktop-based audience.
Starting with key page analysis research, I dug into which Shopify webpages were most often visited by users navigating on a mobile device, to better understand what this segment needed to know. Next, I partnered with the content team leading a larger desktop website redesign, to scope out a new narrative that focused on the flexibility of managing an online store from your phone.
Within this experiment, we tested a few different headline variations and video treatments, in order to better understand how messaging showed up for users on their phone screen. We landed on “Sell online, in store, and around the world”—a major improvement from the long-standing tagline “The platform commerce is built on.”
Based on high executive buy-in, this experiment was paused and the mobile-first homepage was rolled out to a 100% audience within the first few weeks of testing.
Shopify’s original mobile homepage (left) showcased desktop user benefits and visuals, and created confusion for new merchants.
The mobile-first iteration (right) focused on the freedom merchants can achieve from managing their online store from a mobile device.
Building great user experiences
Finally, I worked on a variety of UX optimizations and new features within Shopify’s core products. This involved partnering with product designers to create in-product messaging that would better inspire action and trigger adoption and retention—similar to the account setup guide.
A great example is a series of in-app reminders that I developed to encourage merchants to allow notifications, in order to keep Shopify milestones front of mind for mobile users.
