Current role

shopify

Quality & Trust

Lead Product Designer

At Shopify, we organize our teams by domain area rather than by discipline. I'm part of the Ecosystem product line which enables third party Partners to connect with our Merchants. More specifically, I work on the Quality & Trust team and I focus on the developer experience of understanding, meeting and maintaining Shopify's app quality standards.

I work with a multi-discipline team to create data-driven experiments that aim to increase merchant success metrics.

A typical day

My day-to-day depends on which projects I have on the go and what stage they're at. Shopify uses a three stage model for projects: explore, build, launch. If I'm working on a project that's in the explore stage, you'll likely find me in a lot of meetings and workshops with engineers, PMs, and stakeholders. This stage tends to involve research, planning, project management, brainstorming, mapping flows, modelling concepts, and writing docs and updates. 

Once we've made key decisions and scoped the project's requirements, we can move onto the build stage. At this point, I'd be working on putting together UI mockups, reviewing the UX with the team, other designers and leadership, pairing with engineers and iterating the UX as needed. The build stage also includes planning the go-to-market strategy which means working with stakeholders to put together the materials for marketing as well as the internal support packages and general comms. 

Accomplishments 

  • Contributed to a new app developer incentive program to recognize high quality apps that are "Built for Shopify", and raise the quality standards of Apps in the Shopify Ecosystem
    • Collaboration and coordination across multiple teams, disciplines, and work streams
    • User experience and interface design of the developer experience discovering and participating in the program to be recognized as a high quality app
    • Highly visible project with many stakeholders
  • Championed the launch of an app recommendation modal in the admin to help merchants find apps for their store
    • Collaboration and coordination across multiple teams, disciplines, and work streams
    • User experience and interface design of the modal and its content
    • Highly visible project with many stakeholders
  • Executed successful experiments in the Merchant Engagement of Apps space, making use of Admin empty states to help merchants find apps to help them finish building their stores. 
    • Experiment design - Hypothesis, cohorts, etc.
    • User experience and interface design of the experiment variants
    • Research and analysis
    • Post-experiment recommendation
  • Championed the launch of Annual Billing for Apps, a long-awaited billing API capability for app subscriptions
    • Project management
    • API design 
    • User experience and interface design of surfaces that impact both merchants and app developers
    • Highly technical project that involved multiple complex systems as well as financial and accounting requirements
  • Contributed to the design and launch of the Shopify Billing API
    • Domain modelling
    • Information Architecture
    • User research and usability testing
    • Launch plan 
  • Shared my experience of bringing UX Thinking into API Design at multiple conferences and events

 

Steph at DevRelCon London 2019