There’s just so many things wrong with the shopify admin page from a UI design and usability perspective, I don’t even know where to begin. I’ve been using the product for 3 years now hoping it will get better but honestly it’s only gotten slower and worse, to the point I’m looking into other companies to see if their admin area is any better.
Here are a few items i’d like to outline in hopes that somewhere, somehow a shopify developer will see this and take note, so that we can all have a better experience as admins of our stores.
- The number one problem with the admin area, is the squeezed main column area. In the modern age of web apps, it makes absolutely no sense what so ever that the main column of the UI is not liquid. This one decision alone produces all sorts of follow on interface problems, most notably when there are nested tables. The most glaring example is the variations list, which was most recently made worse by this terrible edit button out to the right of each row. Not only is this a non standard UI but it’s horrible to use and the displayed data is ultra limited.
Why does the main column not just expand to fill the page.
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Buttons scattered throughout the interface. Several buttons are scattered throughout the interface and place in really annoying areas. The most obvious example is the “Delete Product” and “Archive Product” buttons which are placed way down at the bottom of the screen of the product details view. Why in the world aren’t these buttons placed in the actions menu at the top? Those of us who have a large metadata set, have to scroll for ages just to find the buttons to archive or delete a product.
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Terrible refreshing and speed issues. I suspect a lot of this stems from poor choices deep in the reactjs code, but they manifest themselves in the UI and they slow basic work down incredibly. For example, in the product details view
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Even focusing on the product description and then defocusing, prompts the user to save, even if nothing is changed. This is annoying if you’re just trying to copy some text but now have to answer a prompt just to leave the page.
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Jumpy UIs, this one will drive you crazy. There’s several UI buttons that cause the whole interface to jump around and subsequently cause the use to have to chase the button with the mouse in order to simply click it again. The worst case of this appears when trying to click the up and down arrows for the already mildly confusing inventory popup in the inventory details screen. When you click the up button to increase the inventory the first time, the little popup screen will move and so will the button. It moves so far away, i always ended thinking i would have been better off just putting a total number in and not using this interface.
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No hotkeys, this is more of a wish but the lack of hotkeys for dismissing prompts is annoying, simply clicking enter on prompt screens should dismiss the prompt with the default action.
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Toasts filling the screen and getting stuck. I haven’t seen this as much lately, so it may have been addressed, but i’ve had several times where the toasts at the bottom of the screen fill up the screen and in some cases won’t go away.
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Mismatched interfaces. Why is it in some cases the variant details pops up a limited view of the variant details and in others, it loads a completely different whole page to manage the content. 9 times out of 10, the little popup page is so useless because it’s missing what i want to do, that I have to back out, save the page, then click it again to get the full page of data.
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And lastly is the speed. There’s so many buttons in the site that are forced upon you, like saving when nothing has changed and several more. Often times you have to sit and wait while the site updates data and it’s slow. Loading product details is slow as well.
I’m sorry if this comes across as harsh but little attention is being payed to the admin section of this product and it’s frankly terrible for real users.
