Enterprise businesses on Shopify Plus complete a lot of repetitive tasks. These include tagging orders with a specific property, or capturing payment when an order comes in.

Shopify Flow is a product within Shopify Plus that allows these merchants to build automated tasks based on if/then logic with the goal of driving efficiency in their e-commerce workflows. With this product being relatively new, my projects revolved around maturing interactions between Flow and their users, as well as third-party developers.

While gathering signal from merchants to improve error message content within Shopify Flow, a bigger problem surrounding trust and automation surfaced when I noticed users’ hesitations about using Flow. Whether or not Flow was working as a merchant expected, the lack of situation awareness results in our merchants mistrusting Flow. A large portion of users would speak about Flow with a cautious tone and were reluctant to rely on automation to conduct more high-risk workflows such as capturing payment.

My first instinct was to speak to as many merchants and merchant representatives as possible. I immediately reached out to our UX research team and merchant success team to gather any techniques, tools, and resources.