Designing IA that scales

The Partner’s Dashboard is where developers manage the apps they build on Shopify. A deep information architecture coupled with flat navigation patterns meant new features didn’t have a permanent home, and we relied on banners to inform users about them. We needed to improve the discoverability of new features.

Project goals

  • IA more closely aligned with users’ mental model

  • Accommodate new feature releases for Winter Editions

My role

  • Lead workshops to establish content groupings

  • Content and competitive audit

  • Information architecture and naming

Introducing hierarchy to accommodate growth and different user-types

We were about to reach critical mass for scannability, our navigation was a list of items with no clear order. Everytime a team wanted to add a page, it was a debate on where it belonged on the list.

From user research, I discovered that our navigation worked well for developers, but didn’t work for their team members that were focused on business. Branding assets and authentication URLs were grouped in the same section.

Solution: subheadings to create order within the navigation. This gave us space to add more pages within each section and make development and business tasks distinct.

After

Before

Identifying common content types

API access requests were spread across multiple pages, because teams had different mental models for them. They were categorized in the UI as an API, approval scopes, or beta access.

We moved them all to one page, and I introduced consistent patterns for how we describe them in the UI.

Incremental improvements were key to getting buy-in for the work

Stakeholders liked the solution, but were reluctant to invest in it as a project because of change management concerns. So I broke the changes down into incremental changes that could be picked up as part of other projects. Gradual improvements gave us an opportunity to monitor to make sure these changes weren’t impacting our KPIs, before moving onto the next milestone.

First release through last proposed change to the navigation

Outcomes

Shipped for Shopify’s Winter Edition ‘24.

Unblocked feature releases from other teams.

Increased other team’s awareness of our work and made it easier for them to add to the Partner’s Dashboard.