Archive

Mobile Product Lists Need Very Distinct Hit Areas

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May 21, 2013 · By Christian Holst

This is the 6th in a series of 8 articles on mobile commerce usability that draw on findings from our m-commerce usability report 2013. When displayin

How Should Your Mobile and Desktop Sites Differ?

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May 7, 2013 · By Christian Holst · 2 comments

This is the 5th in a series of 8 articles on mobile commerce usability that draw on findings from our m-commerce usability report 2013. When defining,

Mobile: Never Use Native Drop-Downs for Navigation

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April 23, 2013 · By Jamie Appleseed · 9 comments

This is the 4th in a series of 8 articles on mobile commerce usability that draw on findings from our m-commerce usability report 2013. Many responsiv

Mobile Product Pages: Always Offer a List of Compatible Products

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April 2, 2013 · By Jamie Appleseed

This is the 3rd in a series of 8 articles on mobile commerce usability that draw on findings from our m-commerce usability report 2013. When testing 1

Mobile Form Usability: Place Labels Above the Field

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March 19, 2013 · By Christian Holst · 5 comments

This is the 2nd in a series of 8 articles on mobile commerce usability that draw on findings from our m-commerce usability report 2013. On mobile, sho

M-Commerce Usability: Exploring the Mobile Shopping Experience 2013

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March 12, 2013 · By Baymard Institute

Everybody is talking about mobile. Some e-commerce sites are venturing into it. The potential for m-commerce is enormous: ComScore predict the number

Mobile Form Usability: Avoid Splitting Single Input Entities

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February 12, 2013 · By Jamie Appleseed · 9 comments

This is the 1st in a series of 8 articles on mobile commerce usability that draw on findings from our m-commerce usability report 2013. During our rec

Which Site Seal do People Trust the Most? (2013 Survey Results)

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January 22, 2013 · By Christian Holst · 17 comments

In prior research we have documented how users have little understanding of the actual technical security of web pages and instead mainly rely on what

Social Media: Analyze Affordances, Not Features

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January 8, 2013 · By Jamie Appleseed · 1 comment

Facebook features are designed to trigger social behavior, not create it. Neither software nor media is social, rather it’s human beings that ar

Baymard: 2012 and 2013

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December 26, 2012 · By Baymard Institute · 2 comments

We’ve tested the entire m-commerce shopping experience from homepage, categories, search, and product pages, to the ever daunting checkout proce

6 Ways to Get More Out of Your Order Confirmation Page

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December 4, 2012 · By Jamie Appleseed · 13 comments

Turning visitors into customers is one of the primary goals of any e-commerce site, but what happens after they’ve successfully placed an order? This

A Holistic View on the Current State of Checkout Usability

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November 20, 2012 · By Christian Holst · 2 comments

This is the last in a series of 8 articles on checkout usability that combine findings from our checkout usability research from 2011, and our 2012 be

Add Descriptions To Checkout Form Labels (92% Get It Wrong)

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November 6, 2012 · By Jamie Appleseed · 2 comments

This is the 7th in a series of 8 articles on checkout usability that combine findings from our checkout usability research from 2011, and our 2012 ben

Format the 'Expiration Date' Fields Exactly as the Credit Card (40% Get it Wrong)

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October 23, 2012 · By Christian Holst · 5 comments

This is the 6th in a series of 8 articles on checkout usability that combine findings from our checkout usability research from 2011, and our 2012 ben

Why Your Checkout Process Should Be Completely Linear

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October 3, 2012 · By Jamie Appleseed

This is the 5th in a series of 8 articles on checkout usability that combine findings from our checkout usability research from 2011, and our 2012 ben

Accordion Style Checkouts – the Holy Grail of Checkout Usability?

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September 18, 2012 · By Christian Holst · 2 comments

This is the 4th in a series of 8 articles on checkout usability that combine findings from our checkout usability research from 2011, and our 2012 ben

Checkout Usability Benchmark 2012

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September 5, 2012 · By Baymard Institute

Today we’re launching a checkout usability benchmark of the top 100 grossing e-commerce sites, all audited across 63 checkout usability guidelin

Visually Reinforce Your Credit Card Fields (89% Get it Wrong)

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August 21, 2012 · By Jamie Appleseed · 6 comments

This is the 3rd in a series of 8 articles on checkout usability that combine findings from our checkout usability research from 2011, and our 2012 ben

Checkout Experience: Don't Require Seemingly Unnecessary Information (61% Get it Wrong)

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July 31, 2012 · By Christian Holst · 3 comments

This is the 2nd in a series of 8 articles on checkout usability that combine findings from our checkout usability research from 2011, and our 2012 ben

Checkout Usability: Don't Use "Apply" Buttons (72% Get it Wrong)

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July 11, 2012 · By Jamie Appleseed · 12 comments

This is the 1st in a series of 8 articles on checkout usability that combine findings from our checkout usability research from 2011, and our 2012 ben

3 Types of False Simplicity

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June 6, 2012 · By Christian Holst · 9 comments

Dimitry Fadeyev at UsabilityPost defines False Simplicity this way: “Sometimes, what appears on the surface to be simple is actually far from it&

A Consistent Shopping Experience With Product Thumbnails

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May 22, 2012 · By Jamie Appleseed · 4 comments

Article translated in Portuguese by Carlos Moreira, Boxpi The online shopping experience is often an experience split into two: Browsing experience

Designing With Metaphors & Skeuomorphs

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May 8, 2012 · By Christian Holst

Metaphors are often used in interface designs as a shortcut to tell a story, mimic something tangible and in general make otherwise puzzling digital pr

UI: Proper Indicators for Hidden Elements

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April 25, 2012 · By Christian Holst · 6 comments

Tabs, collapsed menus, accordion forms, and the ever popular hover items such as mega menu drop-downs – progressive disclosure is a great way to cut do

Idea: Error-Fields Only

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April 10, 2012 · By Jamie Appleseed · 23 comments

Update 1. June 2012: After the publication of this article we’ve written a followup article at Smashing Magazine further exploring the “Err

8 Limitations When Designing For Mobile

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March 21, 2012 · By Jamie Appleseed · 10 comments

So you have a website designed for standard desktop computers, but you obviously want to keep up with times and make your site mobile-friendly too. How

UX: 7 Product Image Categories

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March 6, 2012 · By Christian Holst · 10 comments

Images sell. But besides the traditional white-background product image shot from three different angles, which product image categories can you inclu

Checkout Usability: Apply Changes Immediately and Near the Input

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February 22, 2012 · By Jamie Appleseed · 6 comments

During our usability study of the e-commerce checkout experience we found that users have a hard time figuring out what actually happened when changes

UX and the Kano model

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February 7, 2012 · By Christian Holst · 12 comments

I first encountered the Kano model when working on improving the customer’s check-in experience at Copenhagen Airport. The model was conceived by

UI: Getting the Details Right

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January 24, 2012 · By Jamie Appleseed · 5 comments

User interface details matter to the overall user experience. Many users may not consciously notice these details on your site yet they do have an imp

Copywriting: How to Write Useful (Yet Intriguing) Headlines

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January 10, 2012 · By Christian Holst · 7 comments

Writing headlines for online editorial content can be a daunting task with conflicting advise. On the usability side people like Jakob Nielsen argue t

Baymard: 2011 and 2012

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December 27, 2011 · By Baymard Institute

Here at Baymard we write three different categories of UX articles: 1) Research & Guidelines, 2) Case studies, and 3) Observations. We know a lot

UI: Adding Subtle Textures for Depth

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December 6, 2011 · By Jamie Appleseed · 7 comments

More and more sites and applications are using subtle textures to give their design a more distinguished look. The wise use of subtle textures for back

UI: Thoughts on the New Facebook Timeline Design

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November 16, 2011 · By Jamie Appleseed · 9 comments

The new Facebook timeline is a dramatic departure from the current profile view. There’s many things to like about it: good use of metaphor, a se

16 Ways to Make Your Website Seem More Trustworthy

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November 1, 2011 · By Christian Holst · 16 comments

A typical new visitor to your website will determine whether to stay or leave within the first 15 seconds. Since the web got infinite alternatives to y

User Expectations Trump "Persuasive Design"

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October 11, 2011 · By Christian Holst · 2 comments

For some time now we’ve had two different email newsletter sign up forms here on Baymard. The hypothesis was: The traditional “sidebar sig

Jobs' Impact on the Design & UX Industry

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October 9, 2011 · By Jamie Appleseed

36.88% of our traffic the last 31 days has been on Apple devices. I think if there’s any industry that will be forever indebted to this man, Ste

Google's (for now) Novel Approach to "Must Read" Instructions

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September 20, 2011 · By Christian Holst · 4 comments

Web users scan your text, skip paragraphs, click the button that looks like the ‘next’ button, decide whether to stay on your site (or not

Case: 7 UX Considerations When Designing Lens Hawk

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September 6, 2011 · By Christian Holst · 6 comments

As a user experience case study I will go over 7 UX considerations we had when designing Lens Hawk – a massive DSLR lens database we’ve cr

Design Trend: Interfaces with Less Information

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August 16, 2011 · By Jamie Appleseed · 16 comments

When looking at some of the major new designs launched in recent days, an interesting trend seems to emerge: interfaces are getting slimmed down, showi

E-Commerce Without the Website

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August 2, 2011 · By Christian Holst

Smartphones have made computers mobile, and more importantly, they’ve made access to the Internet mobile. This present companies with unprecedent

Observation: Users Will Go Far to Avoid Repeat Form Errors

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July 12, 2011 · By Christian Holst

When conducting the research for our checkout usability report we saw an interesting tendency among the test subjects when it came to form field error

E-Commerce Copywriting: Returning Customer?

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June 28, 2011 · By Jamie Appleseed

When conducting our checkout usability research I noted that quite a few e-commerce sites use “Returning customer?” as the header for thei

Account 'Sign Up': Ask to Confirm E-mail, Not Password

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June 16, 2011 · By Jamie Appleseed · 18 comments

During account ‘sign up’, a misspelled password is annoying, whereas a misspelled e-mail address is hazardous. More and more sites use peo

Poor Copywriting – the UX Problem That Will Never Go Away?

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June 7, 2011 · By Christian Holst · 23 comments

We’ve previously looked at how Google Chrome’s page translate feature had ambiguous copywriting that could leave first time users in doubt

Circles of Care: Segmenting User Engagement

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May 24, 2011 · By Christian Holst · 1 comment

The more involved a user is the more you can ask of him (e.g. fill out a questionnaire, give you money). The opposite is true as well, the less involv

Responsive Web Design and Mobile Devices

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May 7, 2011 · By Jamie Appleseed · 26 comments

Nowadays, people access the Internet from an ever-growing range of devices with very different screen sizes and controls (mouse vs fingers). This pose

One Page Checkouts – the Holy Grail of Checkout Usability?

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April 26, 2011 · By Christian Holst · 20 comments

After having written an article on e-commerce checkout design for Smashing Magazine I got a question from Ryan asking about the “controversy of

10 Ideas for Crafting a Better 'About' Page

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April 14, 2011 · By Christian Holst · 2 comments

New visitors want to know who you are and why they should care. This makes your ‘About’ page one of the most important pages on your websi

How to Preserve Credit Card Details on Form Errors

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April 5, 2011 · By Jamie Appleseed · 7 comments

One of the most fragile parts of an e-commerce checkout is how you handle credit card details. Due to security requirements from VISA and MasterCard (

14 Cart Abandonment Statistics - Please Submit More

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March 31, 2011 · By Baymard Institute

We’ve set out to create the most comprehensive list containing all available statistics on shopping cart abandonment rates. So far we’re u

Home Page Strategy: Category vs. Product

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March 22, 2011 · By Christian Holst · 5 comments

On e-commerce stores with thousands of products the home page quickly gets cluttered. We’ve looked at this in the past: e-commerce home page foc

UX Lessons Learned from Buying Petfood

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March 15, 2011 · By Christian Holst · 3 comments

I was buying pet food the other day (online of course) and stumbled upon one of the strangest flows in checkout process history: you had to provide di

Form Field Usability: Avoid Multi-Column Layouts

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March 8, 2011 · By Jamie Appleseed · 29 comments

When conducting user research on checkout usability we made an interesting observation in regards to form fields arranged in multiple columns. The sho

E-Commerce Checkout Usability: Exploring the Customer's Checkout Experience 2011

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March 1, 2011 · By Baymard Institute · 2 comments

Imagine a brick and mortar store selling consumer goods. It has a great location, a well-designed store, good prices, and great products on the shelve

A/B Testing: Begin with a Problem and Hypothesis

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February 16, 2011 · By Christian Holst · 2 comments

When I talk to people new to the world of A/B testing, I all too often hear something like: “I saw this example of a site that changed the color

9 Ways to Simplify 'Sign In'

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February 8, 2011 · By Christian Holst · 8 comments

Sign in, or “login”, is vital for many web business since their entire userbase has to go through this step regularly. So here’s 8,

19 Ways to Simplify 'Sign Up'

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January 31, 2011 · By Christian Holst · 79 comments

Account creation, or “sign up”, is vital to many web businesses – yet it’s a pain for most web users. Here’s 9, 12, 17, 1

E-Commerce: Why Customers Abandon Their Shopping Cart

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January 19, 2011 · By Jamie Appleseed · 11 comments

During our recent study on checkout usability the test subjects gave us some insight into the many different reasons customers abandon their shopping

User Expectations: Create an Illusion of Space

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January 7, 2011 · By Christian Holst · 15 comments

During our current research on checkout usability we made several interesting discoveries that go beyond checkout usability. One thing we noticed was

Baymard: 2010 and 2011

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December 28, 2010 · By Baymard Institute

Here at Baymard we write three different categories of UX articles: 1) Research & Guidelines, 2) Case studies, and 3) Opinion & Observations.

Mobile: Venturing Into Responsive Design

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December 21, 2010 · By Jamie Appleseed

Due to the heavy snow in Europe these days, I ended up stuck in Amsterdam airport for a flight connecting to Tanzania. This was the perfect opportunit

E-commerce Home Page Focus

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December 14, 2010 · By Jamie Appleseed

When people are visiting your site, do you know what they are looking for? Is it obvious to your visitors what you want to promote? Or is your home pa

Mobile: Thoughts on Native apps vs Web apps

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December 7, 2010 · By Jamie Appleseed · 2 comments

Apps for iPad/iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Nokia, Windows Phone, Palm, etc… it’s really amazing to see so many designers and developers wo

Scannability: How to Highlight Text on the Web

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November 30, 2010 · By Christian Holst · 2 comments

Highlights can effectively be used in web design to guide the readers attention towards specific sentences or words. It comes from the realization tha

Redefining the Customer Experience with Augmented Reality

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November 22, 2010 · By Christian Holst · 4 comments

One of the greatest barriers in e-commerce is that the customer never gets to try out the product before buying it, as opposed to shopping in a physic

"What's this?" Link & Tooltip

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November 9, 2010 · By Jamie Appleseed · 2 comments

I just stumbled upon this interesting spin on the good old “What’s this?” help link. In Wildbit’s Postmark app you’re gr

Readability: the Optimal Line Length

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November 1, 2010 · By Christian Holst · 35 comments

Having the right amount of characters on each line is key to the readability of your text. It shouldn’t merely be your design that dictates the

The Serial Position Effect in Web Design

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October 23, 2010 · By Christian Holst · 4 comments

The “serial position effect” describes how list items that are first and last in a list are more likely to be remembered than the items in

HTML5: Anchor Content, Not Anchor Text

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October 13, 2010 · By Jamie Appleseed

When talking about links, the term “anchor text” has been used for ages now. I think it’s time we retire this term in favor of a new

From Sketch to Website (Hint: Skip Photoshop)

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October 5, 2010 · By Jamie Appleseed · 25 comments

The purpose of sketching is to quickly try out many different solutions to the same problem. In web design, this means that the purpose of your sketch

3 Examples of Inline Help

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September 24, 2010 · By Christian Holst · 8 comments

Help text: either it’s there when you don’t need it, or you can’t find it when you do need it. Let’s take a look at 3 different

Top 11 E-commerce Usability and Optimization Resources

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September 12, 2010 · By Baymard Institute

At Baymard Institute we have a long list of blogs, newsletters and articles databases we read for information and insights on usability and conversion

Form Field Usability: Matching User Expectations

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August 31, 2010 · By Jamie Appleseed · 13 comments

I see the mistake again and again – web designers that either don’t adjust the width of their form fields at all or adjust it based on what looks

Visual Balance: Dealing with Variable Headline Lengths

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August 24, 2010 · By Jamie Appleseed · 2 comments

How do you maintain the visual balance in your design when the length of your headlines vary dramatically? A long headline will naturally demand more a

Formatting Links for Usability

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August 17, 2010 · By Jamie Appleseed · 20 comments

Links are how people navigate your site. Which is why it’s crucial that you follow 3 basic link usability guidelines: 1) underlining links, 2) co

Drop-Down Usability: When You Should (and Shouldn't) Use Them

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August 5, 2010 · By Christian Holst · 36 comments

Drop-down lists are great – when used correctly. If there’s anywhere between 7 and 15 options, a drop-down list is usually a really good fit. Yo

Conversion: Reducing Sign Up Friction

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July 28, 2010 · By Jamie Appleseed · 4 comments

How many free web services can you sign up for nowadays, by only providing a username, email and password? Countless. The home page for these web serv

4 User Interface Sketching Pitfalls

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June 24, 2010 · By Jamie Appleseed · 3 comments

When sketching a new user interface there’s a few things to watch out for. Here’s 4 common pitfalls: 1. Drawing things in too much detail

The Conversion Rate Optimization Industry in 2015

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June 6, 2010 · By Christian Holst · 3 comments

What will the conversion rate optimization industry look like in year 2015? Here’s my take on an industry that in many ways look like the SEO in

Why Jack Johnson's Splash Screen(!) is Great

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May 26, 2010 · By Jamie Appleseed

I’m almost as excited about Jack Johnson’s new album as I am about the splash screen he’s using to promote it. Now, 98% of the time,

Links and the Hover State

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May 17, 2010 · By Jamie Appleseed · 1 comment

I previously wrote about links and the visited state. This post is about links and the hover state – what it is, why it’s important, and how to u

Comparing Conversion Rates is Nonsense

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May 9, 2010 · By Christian Holst

In the e-commerce industry I often see people comparing conversion rate samples between different sites as a way to measure the attractiveness of thei

Customers Perceive Only Parts of a Checkout-page as Being Secure

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April 28, 2010 · By Christian Holst · 2 comments

In our latest usability study on e-commerce checkouts we made an interesting observation: several of the test subjects talked about certain parts of th

Google Chrome and the Importance of Good Copywriting

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April 16, 2010 · By Jamie Appleseed · 2 comments

If you’re using Google’s Chrome browser and access a page that isn’t in English (or whatever your default language is) you see a mess

Handling Technical Glitches Without Losing Sales

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April 10, 2010 · By Christian Holst · 2 comments

During our latest usability study we used live websites which caused a number of our test subjects to run into technical errors or site maintenance. In

How Google Keep their iPhone Visitors Coming Back

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March 30, 2010 · By Jamie Appleseed · 7 comments

Google’s mobile interface for Google Buzz sports a brilliant call to action that is customized specifically to the mobile phone you’re usi

People Think Registration Leads to "Spam"

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March 25, 2010 · By Jamie Appleseed

Customers hate signing up for an account when all they want to do is buy a product from your e-commerce store. One of the reasons people hate registrat

Contextual Words like "Continue" are Usability Poison

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March 15, 2010 · By Christian Holst · 8 comments

The word “Continue” is contextual, so depending on your frame of mind, “Continue” can have many different meanings. During our

Review of Rework

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March 2, 2010 · By Jamie Appleseed · 1 comment

The short version: Rework is the most important business book I’ve read in months. Not because of the solutions presented in the book, but becaus

Silverback: Screen Recording for Usability Studies

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February 24, 2010 · By Christian Holst · 2 comments

When doing qualitative usability studies it’s a great idea to record your sessions with the users. Silverback is a software application made spe

Why People Buy Online

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February 14, 2010 · By Jamie Appleseed · 2 comments

There’s 3 reasons people buy online as opposed to offline: selection, convenience and price. You should deliver on at least one of them. 1) Selec

People Still Double-Click Online

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February 4, 2010 · By Jamie Appleseed · 5 comments

During our most recent research study we once again found that a surprisingly large number (more than 50%) of the people aged 40+ still double-click on

A Preparation Checklist for Conducting Web Usability Studies

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January 26, 2010 · By Christian Holst

Doing small and simple usability studies usually give you a great return on investment – testing as little as 5 subjects can yield up to 85% of a

Links and the Visited State

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January 12, 2010 · By Jamie Appleseed · 3 comments

The visited state on links is one of the biggest opportunities in web design – it’s basically personalized history for each of your visitor

Video: CAPTCHA Done Wrong

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December 13, 2009 · By Baymard Institute

When we stumbled upon Netflix’s home page the other day we immediately thought that this would be a good showcase for how not to do your CAPTCHA.

Decoration - the Enemy of Good Web Design

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December 3, 2009 · By Jamie Appleseed · 7 comments

When you ask some web “designers” why they added a certain element to their site they’ll answer “because it looks good”.

Making a Slow Site Appear Fast

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November 28, 2009 · By Christian Holst · 1 comment

A recent study by Forrester and Akamai showed that 47% of your website visitors expects your page to load in less than 2 seconds, and 40% will abandon

Video: Designing a new Website

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November 21, 2009 · By Jamie Appleseed

To finish off the “Designing a new Website” series, we’ve put together a video for you where we walk through this site, explaining ou

How to Lower Your Chargeback Rate

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November 13, 2009 · By Christian Holst · 6 comments

You’ve just made a sale in you e-commerce store. But 27 days down the road you are faced with a chargeback request from your merchant account pro

CAPTCHA Can Kill Your Conversion Rate

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November 4, 2009 · By Christian Holst · 17 comments

More and more websites are using CAPTCHA to avoid spam, but they’re typically bad for your business as CAPTCHAs have major usability problems. M

Designing a new Website #3: Finished Layout

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October 24, 2009 · By Jamie Appleseed

(This is part three in a series of posts about designing a new webpage from scratch, before you have any concrete data to guide your design-decisions.)

Subliminally Directing Visitor Attention Towards Your Page's Goal

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October 20, 2009 · By Christian Holst · 2 comments

Today we’re going to take a look at a technique which can be used to subliminally direct your visitor’s attention towards the goal of your

Designing a new Website #2: Design Drafts

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October 13, 2009 · By Jamie Appleseed

(This is part two in a series of posts about designing a new webpage from scratch, before you have any concrete data to guide your design-decisions.) W

Designing a new Website #1: Priority Lists

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October 10, 2009 · By Jamie Appleseed · 2 comments

(This is part one in a series of posts about designing a new webpage from scratch, before you have any concrete data to guide your design-decisions.) W

How I Increased Newsletter Sign-Up Rate 274%

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October 4, 2009 · By Christian Holst

One year ago I got quite a big surprise when looking at the statistics of a newly launched website: out of 2,000 visitors, 32% clicked a link leading t

Conversion Design: the Real Purpose of Web Design

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September 29, 2009 · By Christian Holst · 12 comments

What exactly do Toyota, Nike and Apple expect in return when they throw millions at their designers? “Something really pretty; something beautifu