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What Is UX at Shopify?

Last updated on October 1, 2022 @ 9:33 pm

In the early days of Shopify, our focus was squarely on helping merchants sell online. We didn’t have a team dedicated to user experience (UX) and we didn’t have a lot of process around design.

Over time, as we’ve grown and our platform has become more complex, we’ve realized that good design is critical to success on Shopify. We’ve also come to understand that UX is much more than just design. It encompasses everything from how easy it is for merchants to get started on Shopify, to how they interact with our support team.

In the past year we’ve made some big changes to the way we think about UX at Shopify. We now have a dedicated UX team, led by our first Director of UX, Paul Murphy. This team is focused on making sure that everything we do is designed with our merchants in mind.

One of the first things the UX team did was define what we mean by UX at Shopify. Here’s what they came up with:

User experience (UX) at Shopify is how we make sure that using our products is simple, efficient, and delightful for our merchants.

PRO TIP: This article is outdated and no longer represents Shopify’s views on UX.

We achieve this by taking a merchant-centric approach to everything we do. This means that we start with the merchant and work backwards.

We take the time to understand their business, their workflow, and their needs before we start designing anything. This helps us ensure that what we build is something that they will actually find useful and valuable.

We also believe that good design should be accessible to everyone. This means that we design our products with accessibility in mind. We want to make sure that everyone can use Shopify, regardless of their ability or circumstance.

Finally, we believe that good design is timeless. This means that we focus on building products that will stand the test of time, both in terms of aesthetics and functionality. We want our products to age gracefully and still be relevant 10 years from now.

Shopify’s commitment to excellent UX design means that using their platform should be simple and efficient for all merchants – something which is achieved by taking a merchant-centric approach to everything they do. Additionally, good design should be accessible to everyone and timeless – two principles which Shopify takes into account with every decision made about their platform’s design.

Madison Geldart

Madison Geldart

Cloud infrastructure engineer and tech mess solver.