Shop is a digital shopping app that makes it easy for customers to speed through checkout, track their order and shipment details, and rediscover brands they love.

Shop's Merchandising team's mission was to introduce "Brand Spotlight" as a new collection series that drives awareness to Shop's robust set of high quality and recognizable obsession-worthy brands. This series would highlight a single merchant in order to tout brand names in a more visible fashion on the Home and Explore feeds.

Testing the Concept

Prior to building the full collection, our team wanted to test the performance of the concept to evaluate the value of the project. This experiment was released in May 2022 to 21 million Shop app users and leveraged existing UI/UX from standard collection modules. Users saw Brand Spotlights on both the home and explore feeds which led them to a collection of products from a merchant.

Big wins for Brand Spotlight

The rollout of V1 was incredibly successful for both buyer engagement and conversion. On average, buyers gravitated towards Brand Spotlights over all other home feed modules with 68% more impressions and 21% clicks.

Moreover, on July 8th we released a Brand Spotlight for our Shopify merchant, The Sill and witnessed a dramatic increase in sales and revenue after the collection. The Sill was so grateful for the opportunity to be featured and the VP of E-Commerce reached out to thank our team and inquired about other opportunities to get involved. It was clear that the Brand Spotlight was a hit for both our buyers and merchants, so the question was: what's next?

Creating V2

To take the Brand Spotlight experience to the next level, I wanted to explore how we could take leverage this real estate to present Shopify merchant identities.

I explored how other forms of media present new brands to consumers (Vogue, online articles, blogs, commercials, etc). I noticed that segments such as quotes, reviews, interview, values, user generated content and videos provided brands with a platform to showcase their story.

User Research

After completing market research, I led a user research for 12 active Shop users to understand their shopping behaviour and how they discover new brands. While leading these studies I collaborated with our UX Researcher and Product Managers to formulate a research plan, goals and discussion guide.
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After completing the user research sessions, I sorted and complied our notes into themes and general learnings. Next, I created recommendations presented these findings to the larger team to optimize impact.

The results of the user research were incredibly valuable. Not only did our insights push the Brand Spotlight forward, but the context we gained from our conversations with buyers revealed the interest buyers had for upcoming features. More specifically, for Brand Spotlight we learned that there is a gap in the user discovery flow for new brands - Brand stories and values help new buyers connect with new merchants. There is currently very little opportunity for merchants to present their brands on the Shop app surfaces.

The design team worked together with the product team to create multiple revisions of potential Brand Spotlight page views. Starting with Iteration #1 we emphasized text heavy content as a tool for story telling. However, gradually by collaborating with other Shop teams and leveraging various media content, we were able to develop Iteration #3 which placed more emphasis on visual story telling.

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With this prototype and research we were able to get the buy in and support from senior leadership. We have decided that the release of this feature on the app will be a gradual roll out and interactions may be initially simplified to limit the engineering resources required.

Cross-collaboration with engineers
Prior to conducting user research for the Shop Buyer team, I spoke to other teams across Shop to share my research plan. The purpose of these conversations was to determine if teams were searching for similar answers and would find value in collaborating. The Shop Merchant team was thrilled to hear about this project as they were planning to conduct similar studies shortly. As a result of this collaboration, both teams were able to pool together research, resources and context to increase the impact on Shop.

Driving projects forward
The Brand Spotlight was a feature I owned as a passion project. For this reason, the future and success of this project was reliant on my initiative and personal passion for it's purpose. Through this process, I learned how to reach out and leverage teams and my peers' skills or knowledge to push the project forward.