Shopify Plus 2019-2022.
Blog design and migration.
Scroll ↓
Plug blog migration
The problem: Our blog’s platform wasn’t scaling with us. We needed a better platform for performance metrics and increased customization to create stickier marketing materials.
The solution: From blog to content hub. We used the migration of the blog as an opportunity to include video content, podcasts and engaging sales storytelling.
My role: lead designer
Content first
We used our learnings from the current blog’s heatmapping and data to strategize how to rank content on the home page.
We experimented with the order of these section blocks to best optimize new article reach and trending pieces.
Data driven decisions
Here we broke up the content into a hierarchy and sectioned it out. We took those sections and organized what content should land in each section.
We wanted to make sure we highlighted articles and visuals that will hook readers while also offering organized sections like a themes block.
Hierarchy is king
Continuing to organize the content and discover where articles, videos and features should be displayed.
These lo fidelity mockups allowed us to shape the page visually with the hierarchy applied.
A place of discoverability
A focus for this project was to create a place for users to explore and easily find related content that would interest them.
The addition of theme section and calling out the most popular articles created a more engaging website for the user to explore.
Bucketing the content into series helped with discoverability and increased user’s time on site by 4x.
Creative exploration
We took inspiration from other blogs, magazines and articles from the business world and beyond.
We brainstormed various ways to bring in ideas from these other sources while keeping our goals in mind (hooking readers and keeping them on the site to read more articles).
We also mocked up variations with features (shown bottom right) for specific seasons or important Plus events.
Designs for now and the future
We shipped the first version of the blog’s design with a three step plan to move from this simple layout to a more editorial design.
Unfortunately, our marketing team went through a reorg after we shipped v1 of the website and the project hasn’t progressed to our planned out iterations.
Bringing new life to illustration
A fun element of this project was expanding the brand book for illustrations to bring more personality and interest to the reader.
I owned the ideation, strategy and execution of the Shopify Plus illustration style.
I create a cohesive illustration style that felt sleek and luxurious while being more expressive than it previously was.
The style parameters are still used to this day!