Description list
Description lists are a way to organize and explain related information.
Examples
Use when you need to present merchants with a list of items or terms alongside descriptions and explanations.
They’re particularly useful when you need to list and define terms such as in a glossary.
Best practices
Description lists should:
- Contain terms and associated explanations, or descriptions for each term.
- Provide information that isn’t action-oriented.
- Not be an excuse for using unnecessarily complicated or jargon-filled language. Generally, if merchants need a description list to understand the language in Shopify, we should look for opportunities to simplify the language.
- Not be used to upsell merchants on a feature or service.
Content guidelines
Terms
Terms should be:
- Written in sentence case (the first word capitalized, the rest lowercase)
Do
- Discount code
Don’t
- Discount Code
Term description
Terms descriptions should be:
- Directly related to the term they’re describing
Do
- Discount code: A series of numbers and/or letters that an online shopper may enter at checkout to get a discount or special offer.
Don’t
- Discount code: Having a sale on your store is a great way to sell products quickly.
- Written to describe the merchant benefit or utility
- No more than one or two short sentences in length
- Written in sentence case with all appropriate punctuation, including ending each sentence with a period
- Conversational by using articles (the, a, an)
- Written using plain language
Do
- Abandoned checkout: The details of a checkout that was started but not completed, including the products added and the customer’s details.
Don’t
- Abandoned checkout: Details of products added to checkout but not purchased
Related components
- To create a list of actions or navigation, use the action list component.
Accessibility
See Material Design and development documentation about accessibility for Android:
See Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines and API documentation about accessibility for iOS:
The description list component produces a description list wrapper (<dl>), terms (<dt>), and definitions (<dd>) to convey the relationships between the list items to assistive technology users.
