At Baymard, we’ve just released a new UX benchmark with 10 “Home & Hardware” UX case studies.
This follows from our large-scale user testing and adds to our existing ecommerce UX benchmark.
In this article, we give you a snapshot of the overall UX performance.
10 Home & Hardware UX Case Studies and the Overall Performance
These are the 10 in-depth Home & Hardware UX case studies.
The 10 home improvement and hardware sites have been manually assessed across 500+ research-based UX parameters relevant to Home & Hardware, resulting in 5,000+ weighted UX performance scores and 4,000+ best practice examples from these sites.
Each of the 5,000+ UX performance scores from the 10 Home & Hardware case studies is summarized in the interactive scatterplot below — showing you how they perform collectively and individually:
The overall UX performance of the home improvement and hardware sites ranges from “mediocre” to “decent”.
Overall, the sites demonstrated a solid baseline experience; however, performance was consistently undermined at moments requiring orientation, comparison, and reassurance.
Early discovery often suffered from unclear category structures and distractions caused by ads and promotions, while product lists and filtering tools did not reliably support efficient comparison across variations, quantities, and specifications.
On product pages, strong content depth was frequently offset by disrupted evaluation flow, missing visual context, insufficient order cost information, and subdued “Add to Cart” buttons.
Checkout and self-service flows generally enabled completion, but often lacked clear order cost information, fulfillment details, and confirmation feedback.
These gaps were especially consequential in an industry defined by project timelines, delivery logistics, and ongoing post-purchase management.
As this benchmark shows, with no sites delivering a “good” or better overall user experience, there is plenty of room for improvement.
A publicly available overview of the research and benchmark can be found on our Home & Hardware UX research overview page.
Getting access: all 5,000+ UX performance scores, 4,000+ best practice examples, and the UX insights from researching the Home & Hardware industry are available immediately and in full within Baymard. (If you already have access through an account, open the Home & Hardware UX Benchmark collection.)
If you want to know how your home improvement and hardware desktop site, mobile site, or app performs and compares, then learn more about getting Baymard to conduct a Home & Hardware UX audit of your site or app.
