User Experience

The internet has gotten a lot harder to trust. Consumers are increasingly aware that inauthentic experiences are out there, and that changes the way they approach every site they visit, whether their intent is to browse or purchase. Recent Pantheon research found that 78 percent of consumers are concerned about encountering fake online stores, and…

Imagine stopping at the store after a long day. The lights are bright, music fills the aisles, promotional displays compete for attention and department signs are small, text-heavy and mounted well above eye level. For many, that means nothing more than spending an extra minute finding what they need. But for many people with autism,…

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…