Cognitive ux commerce

Cognitive UX: E-commerce

Scope

Use for a retailer selling its own catalog. Use cognitive-ux-marketplace for third-party listings and sellers; use cognitive-ux-booking for reservation inventory.

Intake

• Identify product attributes and comparison criteria.
• Identify delivery, returns, taxes, fees, subscriptions, and payment constraints.
• Identify device, guest/account policy, and consequences of an error.

State assumptions that could change the design. Define the primary user task, its consequence of failure, and a measurable success outcome before proposing a layout.

Design procedure

1. Organize search, category, filters, and sort around customer-relevant attributes; preserve selected filter context.
2. Make product-page evidence answer fit, compatibility, variant, availability, full cost, delivery, and return questions.
3. Carry cart contents, price components, stock state, and entered data through checkout without surprises.
4. Expose total cost, delivery date/range, return/cancellation terms, recurring charges, and payment consequences before commitment.
5. Provide confirmation, receipt, tracking, support, and recovery for declined payment, out-of-stock, and interrupted checkout.

Label each non-obvious recommendation as Standard / requirement, Evidence-informed default, or Hypothesis to test. Read archetype evidence before making research claims.

Required outputs

• catalog and refinement model
• product decision-aid specification
• cart/checkout state flow
• cost and returns disclosure checklist
• purchase and post-purchase usability study
• Evidence-to-decision table: decision → mechanism → source → label → limitation → test metric.
• Accessibility, ethics, and recovery-path checklist.

Guardrails

Do not hide fees, preselect add-ons, obstruct cancellation, make a return path ambiguous, or treat fewer checkout fields as automatically better.

Related skills

Use cognitive-ux-marketplace, cognitive-ux-finance, and cognitive-ux-sales. Do not combine multiple archetypes by default; select the primary user task and add another skill only when a secondary task is independently important.