Linkpop: Curate Shopify Products with Ease
A link-in-bio tool designed for commerce that helps merchants turn audience into customers.
2021-2022
The process of how I work as a product designer in Shopify building a tool to help merchants who sell products through social channels.
My Role
Lead user research, product design, collaborate with PM and other product designers
Project background
As I am part of Growth team, my mission is to support the team and design tools that can help existing merchants to sell products on Shopify. In 2021, we found the Link in bio on Instagram has been a popular source of traffic, engagement and sales for brands. Linktree, Campsite, Linkin.bio by Later, Milkshake, and many link in bio tools available in the market. Before start working on designing a new link in bio tool, I was thinking why do we make a new tool and what could be beneficial for our target users and business.
I want to know how Shopify existing user understand link in bio.
MY first step
Before diving into design, I was curious to know why merchants use link in bio and how they use it today. And for those who do not use link in bio, what they use for their link in bio on Instagram today. I planed a series of user research to interview Shopify merchants with a certain number of Instagram follower and understand their thoughts on link in bio tool and the experience. I believe answering these questions would be beneficial and give us more knowledge on building a commerce-first link in bio tool.
Define research goal and scope
By running user research, I want to collect user feedback on the initial product concept that can help us define product value prop better. We will be able to clarify merchant’s goal, needs and challenges while using link in bio tool, understand if merchant can see the value of using Shopify’s link in bio tool, and finally evaluate the flow of our initial design prototype and see how our shoppable link works.
I lead the team and successfully conducted remote user interview with 19 Shopify merchants mainly base in North America. 11 merchants have link in bio tool experience, 6 merchants have never used that, and 2 merchants have stopped using link in bio tool.
Major USER insights
1. Merchants use link in bio tool to funnel Instagram traffic to their store.
They want to promote products and brands to their audience via Instagram. However, since Instagram does not allow links directly included in post feeds, merchants can not link their posts to products, collections on Shopify, a blog post or website easily.
Link example from one Shopify merchant’s link in bio: shop, subscribe newsletter, wholesale site, blog posts, and podcast.
2. Most of the merchants are willing to switch to Shopify link in bio tool
They trust Shopify and expect to have a link in bio tool integrated into their existing system. Nine merchants who are currently using link in bio on Instagram mentioned if Shopify provides a similar tool, they would prefer to use Shopify’s one as they are already Shopify’s customer and it has all of their data in it. They would expect this tool can have analytics and customization capability (same as Shopify admin) that allow them to maintain the same look and feel on this link in bio page.
3. More guidance is required for merchants who are not familiar with link in bio
For those merchants who are new to link in bio tool , terminology on the UI such as profile page, links, and profile page URL are confusing. On the original landing page and product design prototype, there is lack of explanation about what link in bio tool is used for. Merchants without link in bio knowledge did not have the mindset of of building a profile page can be used in Instagram bio. It’s pretty confusing when they interact with the prototype at the beginning of the page creation flow.
4. Merchants think the shoppable link idea is intriguing but have doubts
From user research, we see different merchants have different ways to sell products. 10/17 merchants concerned the shoppable link only allows purchasing one product at a time. They hope links can allow viewers to buy more than one product and eventually increase their average order value. However, for those merchants like artists, since they make limited pieces, they tend to sell a few products at a time. In this case, showing single product per link makes sense.
Original design to be improved: single product per link
product design
Improvement to shoppable link
In the new design, I propose to provide options for shoppable link. When adding shoppable links, user can choose the way they want to display on the page. Make one product as a link, or make multiple products as a link.
Let merchant decide to display one or multiple products per link
Optimizing buyer’s view
Upon feedback, merchants concerned about the efficiency of using the single product card layout. In the new design, the single product card has been changed and being more consistent with other links. And I design the multiple product card to allow merchant to showcase their collection.
In this new proposal, instead of having only one product dominates the page, I design a new layout allows more links to be shown above the fold. Within this flow, buyers can easily browse product from different links and add products to cart so it can be checked out together.More content and products can be seen when viewer browsing through link in bio page.
Adding user onboarding
Even after browsing through the landing page, 4/6 new to link in bio participants did not understand what ‘Profile page’ mean and how it works when landed on the admin site.
Instead of jumping into the landing page and asking users to start the flow manually, the new design runs merchants through profile page set up flow for their first time.
The onboarding walkthrough UI shows instructional UI and default options on the profile page creation flow. The design provides auto-filled store information by using merchant’s Shopify account. The onboarding design that auto populates store info (store name, URL, logo, etc) pulled from merchant’s Shopify admin creates a shallow learning curve that helps them to set up link in bio profile quickly.
Better customizability
In order to build up the same experience as storefront and branding, merchants highly request for more options to customize link in bio page for providing seamless buyer experience. For example, more font, color, icon and layout option for customizing page look and feel.
