Portfolio. >. Shopify

Shopify search redesign

The challenge
Search usage on the Shopify merchant dashboard was historically low, but the vision was to speed up response time, improve relevance, and turn search into a power tool with a command palette.

My role
I led the content track, mapping the architecture of search results, creating filter taxonomy and creating a glossary of search terminology.

Results
My anatomy of a search result became the foundation for UX design layout as well as engineering logic.

Skills
Information Architecture, UX Writing, Taxonomy

Anatomy of a search result

Merchants can search for a wide range of records within their store, whether it’s orders, products, customers, blog posts or more. An order result has completely different information than a product result so knowing which data to display and when is key to a comprehensive content org.

As the content designer, my goal was to vet search result metadata with product teams. I found, for example, that the Customers team wanted to add phone number and total spend to results as way to parse data more quickly, while the Orders team wanted to add the status of the order.

  • Result architecture

    I cataloged all of the possible elements of a result—and standardized as much as possible. Results might have different types and amounts of metadata, but the structure would be the same.

  • Content variation

    I documented the minimum and maximum number of elements that could appear so that UX designers knew the range of possible layouts and could harmonize the different result types that might sit side by side.

Search system map

I mapped out how a user moved through the system, how the system responded and, most important, what content types were searchable.