Shopify Case Study.
Scope
Project
Role
Year
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Overview
(01)
I was brought in as a Staff Product Designer to add strategic oversight, sharpen design solutions, generate new ideas, and mentor the team working on merchant operations - one of Shopify's most critical and most-used surfaces.
When the UX manager leading the team left a few months in, the role expanded. The senior UX manager above handled people and HR. I kept the work moving - running weekly rituals, reviewing designs, maintaining the cadence that holds a team together when leadership changes. No title change. Just the work that needed doing.
The design problem itself was already in motion. Every day, millions of Shopify merchants start their day on the same screen - the orders index. A flat table. Every order, in a list. No prioritization, no triage, no signal about what needs attention now versus later. The problem was real. The question was how to solve it without breaking the surface merchants already trusted.
Working on the most used Shopify Surface
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Phase 1
(02)
Order Tasks - The Original Hypothesis
When I joined, Order Tasks had been running for three to six months. The concept was a task-driven triage layer - a new surface that bucketed orders by status: open, received today, ready to fulfill, shipped, fraud alerts. Merchants would triage from the task view, then drill into filtered sub-lists.
It was a reasonable response to a real problem. What it lacked was merchant validation - and when we put a prototype in front of them, their response was consistent: this is interesting, but I don't want a new place to go. The orders index was their home base. Pulling them away from it - even to something smarter - created friction instead of clarity.
The research didn't kill the work. It redirected it. And redirecting it became my mandate.
Gaining Context
Overview
Problem: Merchants needed triage and prioritization, but the existing orders index had none.
Action: Evaluated the existing Order Tasks hypothesis; ran merchant validation with prototypes.
Result: Research surfaced a critical insight - merchants wouldn't leave the orders index. Direction pivoted before engineering investment locked in.
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Vision
(03)
The Pivot - Green-pathing
Working with the senior UX manager, we reframed the problem: how do we bring the value of task-driven prioritization into the existing orders surface, without replacing it?
The org was still finding its footing. I drove the thinking anyway - running workshops, aligning stakeholders, keeping the design team moving through the uncertainty.
The product complexity was real. The orders index at that point was outbound only - no recognition of inbound orders, no support for multiple packages on a single order, no unified view of shipping labels, returns, or fulfillments. Three major workstreams were converging simultaneously: returns, multi-package fulfillments, and shipping labels - all of them touching the orders surface, none of them yet unified. Each workstream had its own PM, its own design lead, its own timeline.
My job was to find a single interface that could hold all of it, without overwhelming the merchant who just needed to know what to do next.
Problem: Three converging workstreams - returns, multi-package fulfillments, shipping labels - all touching the same surface with no unified direction.
Action: Reframed the problem space; ran cross-functional workshops across design, product, and engineering to build alignment and pressure-test direction.
Result: Consensus reached on a unified approach. Direction held up through stakeholder review.
Unified Surface
Merchants didn't need a new destination. They needed signal layered onto the surface they already trusted.
Green-pathing kept merchants on the orders index - their home - but added a stat-style header bar above it. Outstanding tasks surfaced as scannable counts: orders to fulfill, shipments pending, returns to process, issues flagged. No context switch. Just signal.
Below the header, the orders surface itself was expanded:
Directionality - inbound and outbound orders distinguished for the first time
Multi-package fulfillments - a single order's complexity made visible, not hidden
Shipping labels - surfaced inline, not buried in a separate flow
Issue grouping - a prioritization system that surfaced problems worth acting on first
The direction was socialized through stakeholder workshops across design, product, and engineering. It held up. The work was stopped by a reduction in force before it shipped.
Problem: No single interface could hold returns, multi-package fulfillments, and shipping labels without overwhelming merchants or pulling them off the orders index.
Action: Designed Green-pathing - a stat-style header layer surfacing task counts, combined with an expanded orders surface handling directionality, complexity, and issue prioritization.
Result: Direction validated through cross-functional stakeholder review. Work stopped by RIF before shipping - not by the design.
Patents
Two patents came out of this engagement.
Point of Pack - a hands-free, orientation-adaptive UI for accelerating physical order packing - filed from the hackathon concept. A second patent, co-invented with the team, covers an AR system that detects purchased products via camera and surfaces contextual post-purchase actions. Granted January 2026.
A note on how I work
The through-line of this engagement isn't any single artifact. It's a way of working: research as a source of invention, not just validation. The packing workflow gap didn't come from a brief — it came from watching how merchants actually operated. Point of Pack came from that. Green-pathing came from the same instinct applied to the software side: what are merchants actually doing, versus what the product assumes they're doing?
That question is where the work starts.