An integrated systemic approach to modelling user experience challenges in fashion e-retail apps

The rapid growth of fashion e-retail applications has intensified the need to deliver seamless user experiences (UX) that enhance customer satisfaction, engagement, and retention. Despite the increasing importance of UX in digital retail environments, existing studies often examine individual challenges in isolation, limiting understanding of how different issues interact and influence overall app performance. This study aims to identify, structure, and analyse the key challenges affecting UX in fashion e-retail applications and to develop a hierarchical framework that explains the relationships among these challenges. A mixed-method approach was employed, combining insights from an extensive literature review, user feedback analysis, and expert consultations involving professionals from app development, UX design, and fashion retail. Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM) was used to establish contextual relationships among the identified challenges, while MICMAC analysis was applied to classify them according to their driving and dependence power. The findings reveal that foundational technical factors, including device compatibility, poor layout and design, buffering, and app crashing, possess the highest driving power and significantly influence other UX-related issues. These root challenges contribute to intermediate problems such as login failures, unresponsive customer support, and security concerns, which subsequently lead to highly dependent outcomes including refund and return issues, incorrect amount display, and failures in real-time updates. The results demonstrate that addressing high-driving-power challenges can generate cascading improvements across multiple dimensions of the user experience. By applying the ISM-MICMAC methodology to the context of fashion e-retail applications, this study provides a novel and systematic understanding of UX challenge interdependencies. The proposed framework contributes to the UX and digital retail literature while offering practical guidance for retailers, app developers, and customer service managers in prioritising interventions that can enhance customer satisfaction, trust, and long-term engagement with fashion e-retail platforms.