Unlocking the power of data using Metafields

How content design helps democratize a complex developer feature for less technical merchants

Annette Bater
Published in
7 min readOct 31, 2022

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The power of data is at the heart of so much potential for our users. There are many amazing business values to centralizing and syndicating data, but, essentially, they add up to one invaluable benefit for brands: an unforgettable customer experience.

But accessing data is often restricted by technical skill. As a content designer, I’ve been working to democratize merchants’ access to data, specifically through Metafields in our product.

Metafields helps merchants to control how they tell the story of their business or product inside Shopify. For example, to add an accurate description of a product you’re selling on Shopify, our merchants often need more than a title, description, and price. Perhaps it’s a winter jacket with different temperature ratings, or a face cream with variable SPF ratings. This is where Metafields come in: it’s the data platform merchants can use to customize data around resources — like customers, product, or even orders — to make Shopify better suited to the business they have and the products they sell.

Historically, merchants needed to use a combination of a Content and/or Product Information Management apps to control data complexity as their business grows and thrives.

Like the rest of the Shopify admin, Metafields now needs to be accessible to all, not just the technically adept few. So, how are we doing that?

Making Metafields accessible

Content design brings a unique UX focus to a highly technical domain so merchants can learn how to harness and manage content and data within an experience they’re already familiar with.

Until last year, Metafields were mainly used by agencies or app developers, but merchants can now access them and add the fields they need to different parts of the store admin.

The challenge, however, is how to empower every merchant to build a flexible, bespoke data model that scales — regardless of technical aptitude.

To me, that’s what my job is: data democratization. I want to help my team build something powerful and approachable. One doesn’t have to come at

Building something powerful and approachable is one of the hardest things to advocate for as a content designer — and it’s the kind of domain not every content designer will thrive in.

the cost of another. But it’s one of the hardest things to advocate for as a content designer and it’s the kind of domain not every content designer will thrive in.

Shopify’s mission is to make commerce better for everyone. Good UX, with human-centric language, is crucial in making such complex functionality approachable. Language has the power to democratize a feature when it’s used strategically. Opaque names and labels that intimidate and obfuscate the intent of the feature and really are adoption roadblocks to broader merchant adoption. Speak to merchants in a way that’s relatable and make those powerful features available to a broader audience.

So, what is the Metafields Platform?

Metafields is the platform that allows data customization in context in key areas of the store admin UI. There are two parts: a definition that describes what the field is and what can be added as a value in it, and the corresponding values that store staff input into that field. For example, an ecommerce manager may want store staff to add details for care instructions, material, or pattern. But those fields aren’t offered in the product admin ‘out of the box’, because they may not apply for the majority of merchants. So Metafields allow those merchants to add more specific attribute fields appropriate for their business to better tell the story of their brand.

Creating a field for “leather color”.
Field appearing in the product admin page for ‘Shoes’.

Current experience

Metafields definitions were announced at Unite last year to introduce them to merchant audiences. The current experience of Metafields is you need to think of the fields you want to use, and then define them under Store Settings. Merchants don’t know how to find this feature easily. Plus the process of defining a field isn’t always the simplest — even with our proposed language naturalization strategies. Merchants then need to figure out how to have the field appear on a resource like a product — our most common use case. So, there’s a heavy conceptual lift that we push on the merchant simply to get started. We’ve learned that most merchants won’t touch anything in Store Settings — unless guided by a developer or a consultant.

Because of the high intimidation factor, merchants almost never use Metafields on their own. So adoption is really low, even though this is strategically important to the success of our merchants. Our UX team is on a mission to ease the friction around the experience. In an ideal scenario, we want merchants to use Metafields without even knowing it.

Enter, standards

I believe the success of broad adoption lies in increasing the number of our standard fields. Because standard fields are pre-built by Shopify, it’s an easier lift to adopt them. They’re already set up and integrated more fully across the ecosystem. For example, say you’re selling suntan lotion and you discover Shopify’s prebuilt an “SPF rating” standard field. You don’t need to set up a custom field, and don’t have to figure out how to add values to themes to make it dynamically visible on the storefront or potentially a filter in Shop. It all just works for you.

The other thing that gets me excited for standards as a content designer is the data consistency we all benefit from when using standards — but especially the experiences we can craft once we have uniformed data. Our data scientists know that consistency is key when it comes to making our data-driven insights and recommendations trustworthy. We can’t offer those experiences now because most of our Metafield adopters are creating custom fields. It’s impossible to aggregate and infer from that data when merchants use different namespaces and different list values — it’s an incomplete picture and potentially biased.

But this isn’t the case with standards: standardization is like a uniform that data wears to make it identifiable as being part of a bigger whole. When that data is pooled, we can harness the power of the collective to educate and incentivize with potentially transformational insights. For example we can match the market to a size-based standard field: have you bought too

When standardized data is pooled, we can harness the power of the collective to educate and incentivize with potentially transformational insights.

much inventory of a certain size for a particular market? A shared set of data used by multiple merchants can start driving those kinds of recommendations and our UX team can start designing for that future where standardized data has limitless experience potential.

But right now, standard fields are often hidden in the UX and in a secondary position to custom fields. This issue is compounded by the limited number of standards we have available now. To help better prepare for the standardized future we want to see, content design UX work is fairly multi-faceted: we’re improving the the information architecture to make standards more discoverable, we’re working to clarify the concept of standardization for our team, and we’re helping to teach our internal developers to define these standards successfully. More visibility. More clarity. More standards.

At some point we will have a deep pool of standard fields for our merchants to draw on — which is an incredible opportunity and challenge for our UX team. To help merchants better navigate standard fields at full scale, we’re currently exploring a way for merchants to see these standards dynamically based on context.

Onboard and guide

Educational experiences are equally important to our adoption strategy as the UX itself. We’re hoping to introduce a form of empty state in the experience to educate and onboard merchants that have low familiarity with the Metafields platform and the types of things you can build on it.

Fields is just one type of object you can build on it. There’s an opportunity to tap into the Shopify Getting Started guide as well so merchants are exposed to the potential of the Metafields Platform and make their business scale better, by showing them how to plan for data flexibility in their nascent onboarding stages. Because we know that once merchants get what Metafields can do, they use them extensively. So there’s untapped potential to capturing the attention of our newest merchants and creating awareness of Metafields early.

Conclusion

Metafields could revolutionize the features we deliver in Shopify if we do this right. Developing data-driven platform capabilities and insights will differentiate Shopify from other commerce giants. And content design is uniquely positioned to help drive the adoption of Metafields broadly among new and existing merchants.

Yes, big data is hard. Standardizing big data is harder still. But if we do it right UX can give merchants a life preserver to navigate that powerful data complexity more easily. And we’ll open up the scale of Shopify to even the smallest of merchants and help them grow their business more quickly.

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