Our editors have kicked off our final editing pass on Store Design, and our work should be off to the printer within the next six weeks. Gosh, isn’t that exciting? I’m excited.
This week, Shopify is rolling out a new checkout system. It’s kind of wild: as a value-based designer I usually find high leverage in checkout improvements. Working on Shopify, I have very little latitude in what we can do with checkout. As this new checkout page rolls out, we’ll have even less latitude. So ultimately, one hopes for the best, and surrenders to Shopify and what they want. Ultimately, I think these improvements are a good thing, although they are clearly more about Shopify’s long-term corporate direction than any palpable improvement for the customer.
There are three sets of stakeholders when Shopify rolls out any change: Shopify, Shopify’s customers (online stores), and Shopify’s customers’ customers (actual customers).
Shopify wins with this change because primary metrics are not materially impacted for the vast majority of stores. The change eliminates technical debt and allows for greater control of checkout on Shopify’s end.
Stores don’t notice the change, unless they are part of the tiny minority that have customized checkout. In the long run, they will hopefully see bumps in primary metrics as Shopify continues optimizing checkout, and as checkout ceases to be relevant (through e.g. Shop Pay or third-party payment providers).
Customers will notice these changes less and less, although single page checkout is ultimately a good decision and should theoretically bump conversion rate for some bigger stores.
I find that those who are freaking out about this change are more on the “bro” side of ecommerce, who have a habit of adding a bunch of countdown timers and trust seals to an already-performant checkout page in order to manipulate customers. That’s not really in alignment with our practice, and history will likely prove us to be correct.
This week, for paid members
- Our weekly lesson is about SMS. Not terribly sexy, but as people move into other channels they might want to know what the design & compliance ramifications are.
- Our design of the week shows the only cool subscription page. I know: they can exist! Another world is possible.
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Links
- One of my all-time favorite publications about value-based design, Shane Rostad’s CRO Weekly, has returned after a two-year hiatus. His latest, on uncovering hidden landing pages, is a corker for research methods.
- How to create legible color ramps, or palettes that easily move from one color to another. These are different from gradients in that they involve a series of discrete colors, and they focus more on perceptual color changes than mathematical ones.
- One of the things Baymard is great at is providing an expert, research-driven counterpoint to some gobsmackingly bad design ideas. Next up: designing credit card expiration date fields differently from the other text fields on your store.
- For those of you who use content to create a specific, disputable point of view for your store (which should be all of you), in-page links are considered to be helpful. NN/g provides some design guidelines.
- Accessibility apps are bad. More.
- Researching ethically. Quasi-related: lucid thoughts on framework design & application.