Shopify customer segmentation

 

Context

The 2020 segmentation functionality was limited to filtering for customers. Due to this, only 7% of merchants interacted with this part of the Shopify Admin.

When I joined Shopify to be the Customer Segmentation UX Manager, the company had been struggling to bring customer segmentation functionality to merchants for the first time, reducing dependencies on third party apps, and enabling Shopify to become the source of truth for merchant customer data.

Working together with my cross-functional partners and the Shopify Core leadership team, we worked to:

  • Build a new Customer data platform

  • Write a new Segmentation API

  • Create a querying language for merchants

  • Design a new Shopify Admin experience

  • Migrate merchants from the current experience to the new



Definitions

  • Admin
    The merchant-facing interface to manage and run their business

  • Core
    Shopify’s core platform

  • customer data platform
    A unified data platform that functions as the system of record and source of truth for all merchant customer data

  • customer
    A person or organization that interacts with a Shopify merchant or their sales channel

  • customer segmentation
    The ability to meaningfully group and identify a merchant’s customer base

 

UX Strategy

As design manager, I had to bring team together to align on a shared vision and north star. Our new UI would drive both front and back-end development, and decide how the API and customer data platform would be architected.

As a cross-functional team, we were also churning as to how to define the product while aligning to strong direction from executive leaders.

The query builder in action; Shopify’s product principle was to start with the advanced layer first. It was our design challenge to make it feel simple and usable.

 
 
 
 
 
 

The future

A not-to-distant future of Customer Segmentation, as envisioned by lead designer Chloe Tetrault.