Case study
Design Leadership.
I led design on Shopify's highest priority project to design and build a customizable checkout. It launched in 2022, at a scale of hundreds of millions of users and around $200 billion in GMV.
Situation
Shopify’s legacy checkout was rigid and difficult to customize. Because of this, many merchants either moved onto third-party checkouts, or hired developers to do bespoke customizations, which would often “break” their checkout.
Problem for Shopify
$100s of millions of revenue bypassing Shopify.
Problem for users
Increased costs and complexity to make even the simplest customizations, and they were frozen on older versions of checkout, missing out on new functionality and compliance with WCAG, PCI DSS, GDPR, etc.
My role
- Built the UX team from zero to eight product and content designers
- Part of the leadership trio with Product and Engineering directors
- Worked on the North Star and long-term platform strategy
- Led research across thousands of merchants
Approach
- Build a new team from scratch
- Audit 1000s of stores
- Define design vision, quality, and principles
- Design a new end-to-end experience
Turning point
Product wanted to start building. I didn't think we understood merchants well enough.
Rather than turn it into Design versus Product, I worked with Research to make the case for doing discovery properly: six weeks across thousands of stores, talking to merchants and partners.
By the end, Product were so invested that they were running customer interviews themselves.
What stuck with me: the whole team got better at how it makes decisions.
Solution
Checkout as a platform
- Extensions framework
- Developer toolkit
- Design system
- Checkout Editor
Impact
- Checkout platform launched in 2022
- 100s of checkout apps on the Shopify app store
- UI Kit has 1000s of users
- Shopify doubled-down on checkout as a business differentiator