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Settings Guiding Principles

About 

Settings Guiding Principles

Industry

e-commerce

Category

Information Architecture, Governance, Navigation

Challenge

Shopify initially focused on providing a comprehensive e-commerce software solution for smaller merchants, enabling them to efficiently manage a single store. However, for larger merchants operating multiple stores, the options were limited: either create separate store instances and manage them individually or become a Plus Merchant utilizing the organization-level admin. Over time, the Plus admin evolved into a disconnected and disjointed experience. Our challenge was to merge the two admins into a unified, powerful platform that seamlessly empowers merchants to manage all their stores at once.

To achieve this, we needed to establish clear guiding principles and a well-defined content hierarchy to ensure scalability and organization within the Shopify admin settings.

Process Summary

  • Conduct a comprehensive audit of all settings features within both the main admin and the Plus admin.

 

  • Establish a well-defined set of principles to determine the appropriate location for settings:

    • Organization Settings: Reserved for admin preferences and not accessible to customers.

    • Store Settings: Customer-facing configuration options for individual stores. 

 

  • Publish the guiding principles, and redesign settings based on the established guidelines.

Part I - Discovery
Part II - Design

Solution

To ensure a seamless flow, we reorganized customer-facing content in settings and moved any operational system settings to the organization layer. By mapping out the information hierarchy and following our guiding principles, we achieved a clear and user-friendly design that reduced context switching and cognitive load. 

Principles applied to Store overview.png
Project team

Product Design: Anna Borg

Product Owner: Torben Nielsen

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