User Experience

For years, preparing for the holiday shopping season meant launching bigger campaigns, promoting earlier, and ensuring inventory could keep pace with demand. Today, artificial intelligence is changing what peak season readiness requires. Consumers now move seamlessly between social media, e-commerce, reviews, and customer service before deciding whether to make a purchase, creating more opportunities for…

Retailers have spent the last decade investing heavily in customer experience. They've optimized websites, refined mobile journeys, embraced personalization, and invested in CRM platforms to better understand their customers. Collectively, these efforts have transformed how people discover and buy products online. However, while businesses have become increasingly sophisticated at winning the sale, many still underestimate…

Eighty-four percent of software developers report they're using or planning to use artificial intelligence coding tools. These tools are especially useful in front-end e-commerce development, dramatically increasing developer productivity, accelerating feature delivery, reducing routine work, and more. Unfortunately, adoption of AI coding tools can often mean that digital accessibility suffers. Over the past decade, we’ve…

Retailers have spent the last two decades focused on conversion: driving more traffic, reducing checkout friction, tuning site search, and personalizing the experience. Those things still matter, they just don't answer the question that now decides whether many shoppers buy: What is the customer actually trying to accomplish? That's an intent problem. For years, e-commerce…

Retail enterprises have never had more tools to reach customers, and customers have never rated them lower. In June 2025, Forrester’s Global CX Index reported that customer experience (CX) quality in North America had hit an all-time low across 469 brands. In the same window, martech still claimed roughly a fifth of marketing budgets at…

Retail has never been better at adding new experiences. Artificial intelligence-powered recommendations, personalized offers, connected apps and cross-channel journeys are now commonplace. But shopping often still feels more effort than it should. Customers are being asked to compare more options, navigate more touchpoints, and process more information than ever before. They're shopping between meetings, on…

I sit in a lot of usability sessions for AudioEye, a digital accessibility platform. One has stuck with me. A woman who is blind was checking out on a retail site, navigating with a screen reader. Screen readers turn a page's underlying code into speech: a properly labeled button announces as "Place Order, button"; an…

As consumers increasingly turn to artificial intelligence for shopping guidance, many people assumed that AI chatbots could more or less totally replace human decision-making. However, the recent news that OpenAI abandoned ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout feature is eye opening: shoppers increasingly use chatbots for product discovery and comparison but they still want to make the actual…

Imagine you’re a retailer that guides a shopper to an artificial intelligence agent to return a pair of shoes. From a system perspective, measuring the agent’s performance seems simple: either it issues a refund or it doesn’t. But from a customer perspective, that only shows a sliver of the experience. If the refund requires multiple…

For decades, retailers have invested heavily in owning the customer relationship. Loyalty programs, first-party data, and personalization engines were all designed to ensure brands, not intermediaries, understand their customers best. That foundation is now at risk of slipping away as artificial intelligence-powered platforms increasingly take over the shopping experience. As consumers increasingly discover and purchase…