International Journal of Graphic Design
Vol. 4 No. 1 (2026): April | IJGD: International Journal of Graphic Design

Evidence-Grounded Visual Explanation Design for E-commerce Recommendation Cards: Complementary and Substitute Relations, Image Availability, and Interface Hierarchy

Hailin Zhou (Applied Analytics, Columbia University, NY, USA)



Article Info

Publish Date
30 Apr 2026

Abstract

E-commerce recommendation cards must explain why an item is related while maintaining a compact, consistent visual hierarchy. This study presents an evidence-grounded card framework and evaluates its retrieval inputs with the final TREC Product Recommendation 2025 topics, a 48,616-product corpus, 7,633 NIST judgments for 47 topics, and the SQID supplementary image-URL table. Fixed lexical methods generated separate top-10 complement and substitute rankings over the full corpus before assessor judgments were applied. Under the official scoring procedure, the relation-aware lexical method achieved an average nDCG@10 of 0.1840, with a complement nDCG@10 of 0.0562 and a substitute nDCG@10 of 0.3119. Its average difference from full-text TF–IDF was not statistically reliable (difference = 0.0111, 95% CI [-0.0090, 0.0321]). The complement-minus-substitute gap was -0.2557 (95% CI [-0.3151, -0.1937]), confirming that complementary recommendation remains the weaker relation. Requiring a confirmed supplementary image URL increased confirmed URL coverage among displayed items to 100% but reduced average nDCG@10 to 0.0138. The findings support relation-qualified reasons, confirmed-image and text-led fallback states, and conservative language for complementary suggestions. The framework specifies evidence and layout behavior; shopper responses and different verbalization methods require direct comparative evaluation.

Copyrights © 2026






Journal Info

Abbrev

ijgd

Publisher

Subject

Arts Computer Science & IT

Description

This journal is a peer-reviewed and open Visual Communication Design Publication Journal. The fields of study in this journal include the sub-groups of Performing Arts, Arts, journalistic, Crafts, Media, and Design. The Art, Design, and Media ...