Background
Domain is a complicated and technical step for merchants and the current domain experience does not set our merchant up for success.
My role
Our team is set out to tackle 3 pillars in 2022:
1. Guide - Provide a fully guided experience to all merchants by building new primitives and enhancing content in existing ones.
2. Simplify - Make it significantly easier to complete setup actions.
3. Personalize - Provide onboarding experiences that are personalized, holistic, and scalable by design.
This project falls within the simplify pillar. As the project champion of the project and the sole designer, I’m tasked to investigate:
- Does domain needs to be simplify? If so, how? If not, why?
- Is it right time for the team to invest in domain?
Research and Data
A project that’s as ambiguous as this, as a growth designer, we lean heavily on data and research to drive our design decision. From past research and data, we know that adding a domain increases the chances of customer conversion and our merchants are likely to be more successful with a custom domain. Moreover, the most frequent tickets created by merchants in their first 30 days on Shopify are regarding domains - and this applies to 1) Merchants that want to transfer a third party domain 2) Merchants purchasing domains 3) Merchants wanting to use the default myshopify domain.
From these data, we know that the domain experience is worth rethinking.
Goals
After a UX audit and competitive analysis to understand the main merchant areas of friction in each of these 3 flows and to investigate how other companies tackled similar issues, combined with the research and data, I’ve come to the conclusion that the domain needs a revamp.
However, how big of a change we are striking for relies heavily on what other projects the team is tackling at the moment. Since our team had other projects on the flight, we scoped the simplify domain work to gradually improve the domain purchase and connection flow while running small experiments to validate design changes.
Problems we are solving
Bigger picture
In the Simplify pillar, the problem we are solving is “Setup steps are hard to complete and many merchants underestimate the complexity of starting a business and getting set up on Shopify.”
Project specific
We know that merchants with the custom domain are more successful. We are not setting the merchants up for success when there's a lack of guidance on the domain connection flow, and the domain listing page has an ambiguous content hierarchy (evidence from the research & data.)
How might we
For the two problems we are tackling, the "How might we" I’m considering are:
- How might we help more merchants reduce friction on the domain listing page so they can either complete the purchase or connection domain?
- How might we help merchants successfully connect the domains?
Solutions
Zooming in, the team decided to double down on solutions with the strongest data support. As a result, I landed on the two experiments:
1. Domain listing page experiment
How might we help more merchants reduce friction on the domain listing page so they can either complete the purchase or connection domain?
-> Improving the navigation and hierarchy of CTAs in the domain listing landing page will reduce friction in the register domain funnel and ultimately increase L2C.
2. Set up guide experiment
How might we help merchants successfully connect the domains?
-> Providing a contextual video in the persistent setup guide, will provide guidance and reduce existing friction related to the complexity of adding a domain.
Measurement & Impact
Traditionally, the Growth team runs A/B testing to understand the impact of the project; however, this project is part of a larger initiative that we are launching alongside other projects. The team will measure whether all the changes contribute to Net merchant growth and customer retention.