How might Shopify use its ecosystem to help lower the barrier to entrepreneurship in new regions, demographics and business sectors?
a 24-Hour, collaborative hackathon with a multidisciplinary team of data scientists, web developers, and UX designers to create a digital solution for shopify.
Platform:
Desktop web
Role:
UX/UI Designer
Date:
Dec, 2023
Web Developers
Mostafa. A
Tenzing. L
The Team
UX Designers
Leeae. J
Malik. D
Data Scientists
Rahim. K
Lais. A
What is ?
Shopify is an e-commerce platform that enables businesses to create and manage online stores, offering a range of tools for selling products and services.
During my education at Brainstation, I participated in a 24 hour hackathon led by Shopify who came with a problem statement: How might Shopify use its ecosystem to help lower the barrier to entrepreneurship in new regions, demographics and business sectors?
(Presentation day group pic)
Case Study
Case Study
Ecosystem
Ecosystem
The shopify ecosystem is vast. It includes shopify partners, who offer invaluable advice, App developers, who release and manage shopifys bustling app store, Theme builders who design and release shopifys many site themes and affiliates who bring traffic to your store. through promotions and advertisement.
Research
Experience Audit
To begin the process, we looked into the current experience of creating an online store with shopify. Through this, we uncovered two main problems.
Discoverability
The ecosystems features are spread out across the shopify platform making them difficult to acess for newer merchants
Proto-Persona
Our next move was to create a persona and understand who we are designing for, however with our current time crunch, we had to settle for an intelligently informed proto-persona.
Meet Katie
Katie is a new shopify merchant in the process of opening her own online store. She loves the platform but she has a hard time creating her own site. and she isnt quite sure where to get the help she needs to improve it.
Technical Ability
while customizeable, the store creator is very complex and daunting to new merchants, dropping task completion rates.
Ideation
The Plan
our plan was to simplify the store creator while also better informing users of the options available in the shopify ecosystem through a seamless onboarding experience. By implementing these two solutions, we hypothesize that merchants will have increased interaction with shopifys ecosystem and task commpletion rates will skyrocket.
Solution 1
To increase awareness of the many options of the shopify ecosystem, Merchants will be prompted to try them out after website creation.
Task Flow
With a solution thought out. We started mapping out how this new store building flow should look.
Assets
Given the short timeline during the hackathon, we swiftly transitioned from planning to the design phase. Our next step involved gathering Shopify assets available online, ensuring we had a comprehensive library to draw from.
Text Fields
Solution 2
To simplify the process of creating an online store. Users will only need to enter the URL of a webpage they like, and similar styles will be adapted to their shop's page.
Number Pickers
Icons
Navigation
Final Design
After hours of planning, discussing and regular check ins, we finalized the pages and sent them to our developers who did an amazing job implementing our design
Shop Details
Users can enter details about their shop to help the A.I. determine different design aspects of the website
Users can enter the url of a webpage they like and similar styles are adapted to their shops page.
Ecosystem
After the user selects “save”, they will be prompted to make use of Shopifys ecosystem, by integrating apps, getting in touch with partners or affiliates, and implementing new themes from the shopify theme store.
Home
From the home page, before users create their page, they are encouraged to inform themselves of the options available to them through the Shopify ecosystem.
Users have a new choice of an “ai generated design” for a simplified experience designing their webstore.
Store Creator
The site creator is made simple, allowing for drag and drop images as well as editable text styles, which our developers handled amazingly.
In Conclusion…
This 24 hour hackathon was a awesome learning experience. I got work alongside great and communitive web developers and data-scientists. I was able to learn firsthand the process of developing a webpage as well as how to interact with the developers and communicate efficiently to deliver the best results
Overall, I’m happy with the outcome. We created a fully functional 8 page flow directed at educating users and making use of the shopify ecosystem as well as introduced a possible new, easier way to get your shop up and running.
(Groups Final presentation)
