Leading adoption for followed shops: Aligning content patterns with product strategy
Design specs showing Follow existing on Shop’s Home feed.
Using a combination of content modeling, content auditing, and product strategy, I spearheaded the adoption of an important content pattern that bolstered the Shop app’s personalization strategy and paved the way for a series of projects changing the way users interact with merchants on the app.
The problem
In its earliest days, Shop gave users the opportunity to “follow” merchants they were interested in — an action akin to adding, bookmarking, or saving merchants to a favorites list. Following at the time didn’t do much to influence the user’s in-app experience or offer much value beyond giving users a centralized place to find merchants that captured their affinity. Eventually, "followed shops"” was deprecated in favor of “favorite shops,” which ultimately paired with “favorite products.” In the app, users could find both their favorite shops and favorite products in one tab, on one page.
But as time went on and the product matured, favorite shops and favorite products didn’t scale well. In-app, they used the same affordance (a heart button), which made it confusing for users to distinguish the value between the two. Our product teams struggled to communicate the actual benefit of adding shops to your favorites. And we didn’t invest in making favorite shops matter beyond creating a storage space that users didn’t really use despite user research showing us that people couldn’t make heads or tails of its ultimate purpose.
The proposal
I began auditing the favorite shops landscape in and outside the app, finding where that language appeared and how it behaved in the accounts tab, on the Home feed, in nested landing pages, and more.
At the same time, Shop’s leadership adopted a long-term personalization strategy that, among other things, would create logic allowing us to serve users with personalized product and merchant recommendations we knew they would like. Part of that strategy included investing in subscribed content — a type of content that highlights the most important, relevant, and useful content from merchants we know shoppers already love. The idea was this content would help form relationships between shoppers and merchants, ultimately altering the shopper’s in-app experience. Once a shopper chose to engage with a merchant, they’d get served with personalized recommendations, emails, push notifications, price drop alerts, and other communiques inside and outside the app to help reinforce engagement.
Given the emerging landscape, I developed a strong point of view that favorite shops wasn’t the right type of language, content, or feature set for a personalized Shop. Instead, I argued that followed shops would work harder to help users make sense of how and why they experienced what they experienced in the app.
Making the case for followed shops
Title slide from my presentation to leadership
For about two weeks, I audited our previous use of "followed shops", conducted a competitive analysis of how other e-commerce apps use “favorites” and “following” in their products, and developed an ersatz content model showing how "followed shops" and its associated attributes could meaningfully show up in the app. I designed a low-fidelity affordance for following (a follow button) and partnered with product designers across various teams at Shop to perform a future-forward screen audit that visualized how “Follow” would exist in their respective domains.
A screenshot of my ersatz content model. I’m not a huge fan of spreadsheets.
I parlayed all this work into a presentation that I delivered during Design Days, an internal vision sprint for design work we’d champion in the new year. The presentation was well-received, and senior leadership gave their approval for adopting “followed shops.”
Today, design teams are implementing "followed shops" and a new Follow button into their work across the Home feed, search filters, in-app merchant storefront, product display pages, and nested landing experiences. I’ve become a “followed shops” stakeholder, consulting with teams within and outside my product area to help oversee and consult on the rollout across various surfaces. I also developed extensive guidance for “"followed shops"” that I added to our internal documentation. “Followed shops” is changing the way shoppers think about the app and engage with merchants as it’s one of the most explicit signals we have in-app today indicating what our users want to experience when they log on.