Also referred to as: Sort Feature
What’s this? Here you’ll find 371 “Sorting Tool” full-page screenshots annotated with research-based UX insights, sourced from Baymard’s UX benchmark of 214 e-commerce sites. (Note: this is less than 1% of the full research catalog.)
Solid sorting features enable users to order products by the attributes they care about — something that can dramatically speed up the user’s product-exploration and -selection process.
During Baymard’s large-scale usability testing sorting proved to be a crucial part of the users’ product-finding process. Sorting is particularly popular as a soft-boundary alternative to filtering, with many users frequently opting to sort rather than filter because they don’t have a strict range in mind (”I care about cost, but I haven’t decided on a specific budget”), or for parameters where the user lacks the necessary domain knowledge to specify the hard cut-off points required by a filter.
More ‘Sorting Tool’ Insights
Our testing shows that sorting is a generally under-prioritized area of e-commerce that has remained largely unchanged for the past 10–15 years (the entire history of modern e-commerce), with little-to-no innovation. In fact, some sites have started removing sorting features from their product lists altogether in a misguided attempt at simplification. This trend and general stagnation stands in sharp contrast to how important sorting features are to users.
Even for users with extensive domain knowledge or just general web shrewdness, in testing sorting proved to be a powerful feature and was often combined with filtering (“I filter the cameras for ‘water resistant’ models and $300–$500, and then sort that list by customer ratings to see the ‘best ones’ first”).
Learn More: Besides exploring the 371 “Sorting Tool” page design examples below, you may also want to read our related article on “Don’t Base ‘Customer Ratings’ Sorting on Averages Only” and “Category-Specific Sorting: A New Way to Sort Products”.
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357 free UX articles based on large-scale research.
214 top sites ranked by UX performance.
Code samples, demos, and key stats for usability.