Questions and Answers

What was the biggest challenge you faced in creating your store?

The biggest challenge I faced was how to manage payment methods. I was expecting management to be in the left sidebar of the main admin application. Instead, it was nestled in the settings menu. This makes sense in retrospect, as it's something that doesn't need to be managed often, but as a new Shopify user, it took me a little bit to find it.

What worked really well when using our platform?

It was ridiculously easy to figure out how to make theme customizations. The theme I installed itself seemed to have a lot of configuration options. Being new to Shopify, finding out how to make template modifications was a breeze as well, assuming one knows HTML.

What could be improved when using our platform?

Theme customizations were ridiculously easy to make, but some automatic checks for color contrast would be nice along the way. In the current state, merchants can easily make their websites hard to read when managing the colors in a theme. This would be hard to approach from an automated standpoint though, and might make more sense to have some tools added for the WYSIWYG homepage builder?

How did this experience help you build empathy for our merchants?

Being a developer by nature, a lot of the tools built into the admin were pretty intuitive for me to use, but it is not without a learning curve. I imagine a lot of new merchants may get lost in documentation and learning of the UI for the admin. 

 

What is your biggest takeaway from this experience?

Honestly, being the first time I've looked at the Shopify admin, things seem to be pretty easy to use and really show how much care has been put in place to make it as user friendly as possible. I am confident the majority of merchants will find the system easy to manage and use.