Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:03:22 · Aaron Epstein, Marvin Schwaibold
[00:03:22] S0: I've been a big fan of your work for a long time. So maybe first, just start off and tell us about the product design studio at Shopify and what you guys do there. [00:03:29] S1: I work with a team of very talented designers. We've been there for the last year. And between between us, we basically run an initiative at the company to redesign and and touch the most important surfaces we have. So from anything related to Sidekick, which is our AI infrastructure layers that basically manage our entire admin to the mobile app, which we call the green app, and everything from admin and and admin dashboards, we we look at and and and work with. Quite recently, we have been working with a lot of new AI infrastructure that the engineering teams have built for us. And, yeah, it's just been a really exciting exciting last year. [00:04:10] S0: Yeah. It's it's actually really interesting because Shopify is, like, two decades old or something at this point. Right? 20 years old. 20 years old. Yeah. And so we are one, I think, actually. Yeah. We're in a new era now where AI is changing a lot of things, and and it sounds like a lot of the work that you're doing is is actually to modernize and bring it into a a modern era, which is through design, but also the experience itself. Right? Like Yep. What does the design team and your and your product design studio actually work on there? [00:04:35] S1: Are you
00:04:35 · Marvin Schwaibold, Aaron Epstein
[00:04:35] S1: Are you [00:04:35] S0: just, you know, in Figma and canvases and designs and passing them off to engineers? Or or how... What is the design function like that that you manage there? [00:04:44] S1: At least at the moment, there's almost, like, two parts of this big initiative that we're taking. Part of the organization of the design team has redesigned the entire admin experience. This redesign starts in Figma and with polishing interfaces and bringing that into the web. And the other part of the organization, the sidekick team of Shopify, is working on automating and manipulating a lot of the Shopify interfaces via the chat so that you can use chat, Sidekick, or AI infra to basically manage your store and automate a lot of what it means to be a merchant online. And that's like... They're basically two almost controversial, paradoxic sectors of the company, but they work really well together. So you're building really beautiful new UI, but you're also using new UI to basically generate AI info and AI workflows, and that's, like, in in incredible to to see. And a lot of that actually translates very nicely back into the mobile app and is up leveling the mobile experience as well. It's a lot more conversational and a lot more talking to Sidekick about your business than having to manipulate your business via via the interface.
00:04:44 · Marvin Schwaibold, Aaron Epstein
[00:04:44] S1: At least at the moment, there's almost, like, two parts of this big initiative that we're taking. Part of the organization of the design team has redesigned the entire admin experience. This redesign starts in Figma and with polishing interfaces and bringing that into the web. And the other part of the organization, the sidekick team of Shopify, is working on automating and manipulating a lot of the Shopify interfaces via the chat so that you can use chat, Sidekick, or AI infra to basically manage your store and automate a lot of what it means to be a merchant online. And that's like... They're basically two almost controversial, paradoxic sectors of the company, but they work really well together. So you're building really beautiful new UI, but you're also using new UI to basically generate AI info and AI workflows, and that's, like, in in incredible to to see. And a lot of that actually translates very nicely back into the mobile app and is up leveling the mobile experience as well. It's a lot more conversational and a lot more talking to Sidekick about your business than having to manipulate your business via via the interface. [00:05:54] S0: Yep. And previously, before joining Shopify, you were building your own product studio with Molly, and you have incredible motion and animations and interactions there Yeah. That I always found to be really inspiring. And maybe you can show us some of that and and talk through where that came from.
00:05:54 · Aaron Epstein, Marvin Schwaibold
[00:05:54] S0: Yep. And previously, before joining Shopify, you were building your own product studio with Molly, and you have incredible motion and animations and interactions there Yeah. That I always found to be really inspiring. And maybe you can show us some of that and and talk through where that came from. [00:06:10] S1: Yeah. Molly was the... A studio... A design studio in Brooklyn that I was running together with J Tel, my studio partner. We ran the studio for about two years before joining Shopify and and integrating the studio into Shopify. [00:06:23] S0: And you had some huge clients that you worked [00:06:24] S1: with [00:06:24] S0: during [00:06:25] S1: the summer. Right? Yeah. We worked we worked a lot with with Collins and Apple and Google, and also a lot of smaller clients too. It was it was honestly a a broad mix of web design and product design and a lot of content strategy [00:06:35] S0: Mhmm. [00:06:35] S1: And hierarchy for for clients as well when it when it came to their websites. And because we were a small studio, it also allowed us to have extremely close relationships with our clients. We would meet clients weekly for many weeks and use these projects at Molly as, like, very high focused stints with these clients. So we never took on more than two or three clients at a time to stay really focused. Here's just a reel of some of the work we we were doing while we were while we were running our studio.
00:06:35 · Marvin Schwaibold, Aaron Epstein
[00:06:35] S1: And hierarchy for for clients as well when it when it came to their websites. And because we were a small studio, it also allowed us to have extremely close relationships with our clients. We would meet clients weekly for many weeks and use these projects at Molly as, like, very high focused stints with these clients. So we never took on more than two or three clients at a time to stay really focused. Here's just a reel of some of the work we we were doing while we were while we were running our studio. [00:07:05] S0: It's so cool. There's little details here. The animations are very organic. Yeah. And even as each screen changes, the the gradient and the shadow behind it changes to match the color of the background that I think a lot of people maybe wouldn't pick up on. Yeah. But it's something that you sort of intuitively feel Yeah. That something is happening here. Right? [00:07:24] S1: I... We we we we got this idea basically just from the ambient lighting behind behind TVs that are mounted on walls. And I think JTal, and this was pre AI, basically duplicated the video and had it, like, blurred out in the background so that it would match the the rhythm of of what's going on on the screen, and it and it works really nice. And I think what we... Before the sentence, it it it used to just say, Molly is a design studio in Brooklyn, and there was just the gradient at the bottom that was kind of, like, vibrating Right. [00:07:51] S0: I can see it changing
00:07:51 · Aaron Epstein, Marvin Schwaibold
[00:07:51] S0: I can see it changing [00:07:52] S1: thunder or something. Yeah. And it it kind of... At least for us, it always felt like people were, like, inclined to scroll into it. Mhmm. So we didn't even have to show them any of the work, but we kind of hinted at it. Yeah. And then you scrolled into the reel, and yeah, the rest are just very nice and simple carousels. But, yeah, you can see here this was some of the work we were doing with our studio. And I think some of the patterns you were referring to... We used to call the system or we call the system Primal. It's a way to just basically understand content on a website, digest content on a website. And for us, it was a very structured way of digesting when clients came to us with a lot of information for their websites. We helped them build that into a system on the website that allowed users to explore. To us, felt like the way we would build websites and you would flow through the website felt more like you were exploring the website Mhmm. Than the website was demanding your attention. Everything is just one layer away, everything and is progressively disclosed. So you never overwhelm the user with too much content in general. [00:08:52] S0: What are some of the ways that that you accomplish that?