Admin communications system

The problem

When I joined Shopify in 2020, there was no guidance system in place for admin communications. Although we had technical instructions about how to write banners, tooltips, and other components, there was no high-level thinking around when or why to use a certain component in a certain scenario. Teams often picked a component first, then shoehorned their message into their chosen pattern. This created a disjointed admin experience with inconsistent messaging patterns.

In 2023, I took it upon myself to try and create a new “message first” admin communications system. Here’s how I did it.

Step 1: clean out the closet

  • Audited and grouped all existing guidance patterns

  • Identified redundancies and overlap in both content and design

  • Audited and organized all onboarding tasks (100+ strings)

  • Removed inactive strings and defined audience for every onboarding task

Step 2: explore new frameworks

  • Brainstormed new messaging frameworks and performed content modeling exercises using the current guidance patterns

  • Explored how guidance patterns could scale based on these new frameworks

  • Identified gaps in the current guidance system and worked in new guidance patterns like insights and alerts to fill in guidance gaps and elevate overall in-admin guidance system

  • Defined clear roles and boundaries of new and existing guidance patterns

Step 3: align on top-level systems

  • Met with content designers from Growth and Corer teams to brainstorm how their surface areas might fit into a scalable communications system

  • Aligned on 4 primary messaging systems that all admin communications can fit into:

    • Growth

    • Celebrations

    • Learning & Education

    • Operations

Step 4: map the systems to the existing patterns

  • Created a guidance flowchart to visualize common communication scenarios and help other teams quickly understand which guidance pattern they should use

  • This exercise forced the teams who developed certain patterns to define their ideal usage criteria more concretely

Step 5: document and share

  • Documented and shared content guidelines and best practices for guidance system components in a searchable internal help page so that other teams can create and manage their own tasks, insights, alerts, and other guidance components

  • Established a Guidance Glossary for external and internal terminology