Practice — Case Study: Redesign a Checkout Flow (5 questions)

An interviewer gives you a new live prompt: "Same e-commerce app. This time the data shows the drop-off isn't at payment — it's on the Cart page itself, before checkout even begins. 45% of users who add at least one item to their cart never click 'Proceed to Checkout' at all. You have 20 minutes."

Work through this the way the payment-step case study modeled:

1. What clarifying questions would you ask before proposing anything, and why does the fact that this drop-off happens before checkout (not during it) change which questions matter most compared to the payment-step case?
2. Generate 4 distinct, falsifiable hypotheses for why users would abandon at the cart page specifically, each grounded in a different concept (pricing/IA, trust, content, interaction design).
3. Given no further data than what's in the prompt, which hypothesis would you prioritize first, and justify the choice the same way the case study justified its own prioritization — by reasoning about what's structurally specific to this step.
4. Sketch, in words, the one or two most important changes you'd make, tying each to a named design principle.