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Product Lists & Filtering Usability
Exploring the customer’s product browsing experience
An original research study by Baymard Institute
After months of user testing and research, the most in-depth usability study on e-commerce filtering, sorting and product list design is ready.
Full access to the Product Lists & Filtering Usability study includes both a 502-page report with 93 actionable guidelines, and a benchmark database with more than 4,000 UX performance scores and 3,300 implementation examples.
This research-based and pragmatic toolset will help you achieve the best possible product listing user experience and conversion rate.
“Baymard produces some of the most relevant and actionable user experience research available. They really understand the needs of UX and Product Management professionals, and their deep experience in the eCommerce field allows them to offer sophisticated, nuanced insights.”
Report: 93 Research Driven Guidelines for Product Lists & Filtering Perfection
This original usability study focuses on how users browse, filter and evaluate products in e-commerce search results and category pages.
A group of users age 21-56 were recruited to test 19 leading e-commerce sites across 8 different verticals. Despite testing multi-million dollar sites, more than 700 usability issues related to product lists, filtering and sorting, arose during testing. All these issues have been analyzed and distilled into 93 concise guidelines on product list usability.
From this research study you’ll learn what users expect as they interact with product lists on e-commerce sites, what typically goes wrong in the process, why it goes wrong, and exactly what changes to make to avoid these issues. In short: how to design a high-performing product list experience for your users. After all, if users can’t easily browse your product lists, they can’t easily find what they are searching for – and if they can’t find it they can’t buy it.
What you’ll get in the Homepage & Category report
“I can not tell you how much help your benchmark studies have been for our company, e-commerce and UX teams. We have used and continue to use these reports for baseline benchmarks as we build test protocols or eye tracking scripts etc in lab.”
Table of contents
- Introduction 18 pages
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Guideline categories:
- List Layout 39 pages 6 guidelines on the design and features of the overall product list layout, including grid and list layouts
- Loading Products 29 pages 5 guidelines on how new items should be loaded in the product list and how many items should be displayed by default
- List Items 156 pages 31 guidelines on list item information and design, product thumbnails, ‘quick views’, hover and hit areas, personalization, etc.
- Filtering 166 pages 35 guidelines on which filters should be available, their interface and layout, filtering scope and logic, applied state, etc.
- Sorting 51 pages 11 guidelines on the default sort type, sorting interface and scope, as well as the sort types needed
- Comparison Tool 24 pages 5 guidelines on when to have a comparison feature and how to design the compare link and comparison view
- Case Studies 17 reviews Including Amazon, Target, Kohl’s, Wayfair, B&H Photo, and Sears
- Checklist for all 93 guidelines 9 pages
- Methodology, Authors, etc. 8 pages
“The Baymard reports have proven to be an invaluable resource for us. Comprehensive, pragmatic and actionable. We have redesigned our checkout process and made changes to our category pages based on usability guidelines in the reports.”
Benchmark: Are Your Product Lists & Filters Better than Macy’s or Amazon’s?
Based on the findings from the research study we’ve benchmarked the product list, filtering and sorting implementation of 50 top grossing e-commerce sites in the US. This provides you with a comprehensive benchmark database with 215 pages reviewed, 1,100+ screenshots, and 2,200+ examples of the 93 product list usability guidelines.
The benchmark database is fully integrated with the report and comes bundled as part of the purchase, providing you with 50 case studies from the top e-commerce sites, acting as examples and inspiration on how to implement each of the 93 guidelines in the report.
Furthermore the benchmark database provides an interactive tool for you to review your own site (or your client’s) and compare it directly against the top e-commerce sites.
What You’ll Get in the Homepage & Category Benchmark
“Excellent tool – looking forward to using it with our other sites and prototypes as they’re developed.”
Compared to other industry reports
| eConsultancy E-Commerce Best Practice | Baymard Institute E-Commerce Product Lists | Nielsen Norman Group E-Commerce User Experience | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pages: | 99 pages | 502 pages | 2,140 pages |
| Guidelines: | - | 93 guidelines | 874 guidelines |
| Source: | Author’s thoughts | User testing | User testing |
| Benchmark: | No | Yes, 50 sites reviewed | No |
| Review tool: | No | Yes, interactive review tool | No |
| Price: | $695 | $200 | $996 |
| Refund: | No | Yes, 14 days full refund | No |
“These reports are fabulous. The content is exactly what our team has been looking for, and so much more! Extremely helpful, thank you!”
Get your report and benchmark now
Get instant access to the usability report and benchmark database for $200, and start improving your product list usability today at just $2.2 per actionable guideline.
Refund policy: We stand by our research and offer you a full 14 days “no questions asked” refund. If you’re not satisfied, simply e-mail us at christian@baymard.com for a full refund.
Report details
- Title: E-Commerce Product Lists & Filtering Usability
- Authors: Jamie Appleseed, Christian Holst, Thomas Grønne
- ISBN: 978-87-994365-5-2
- Published: March 2015
- Delivery: Instant PDF-download (DRM-free), 130mb
- Content: 502 pages, 93 guidelines
Benchmark details
The benchmark database has four components:
- Review: Interactive checklist for reviewing your own sites
- Guidelines: 93 usability guidelines with examples from the 50 benchmarked sites
- Site reviews: Case studies of the top 50 grossing e-commerce sites
- Page types: Navigate filtering and sorting implementations by type of page
Report license
The report and Baymard Pro account are intended for internal use - for you and your team.
You and your team are allowed to both print and digitally distribute the report to employees within your own organization (i.e. within the same legal entity), as long as it is not accessible to anyone outside it.
We trust our customers, so all reports we sell are unrestricted – this means that no DRM or other restrictive technologies are used.
Authors
Research is conducted and published by Baymard Institute, and written by its two founders:
- Christian Holst – User experience engineer with a master's degree from the Technical University of Denmark. He has worked with designing user experiences in both the hearing aid and the credit card industry before co-founding Baymard Institute 2009.
- Jamie Appleseed – Has a decade's worth of work experience designing and coding websites, with a focus on user experience. He has worked as lead developer on numerous web projects at web agency Spoiled Milk before co-founding Baymard Institute in 2009.
Baymard Institute’s research is used by:
“Baymard have been a great resource in helping us improve the customer experience. We are continually applying these best practices to our sites.”
“Intelligent, consumer-focused insights that are clear and actionable. The team in the room really loved the way the Baymard Institute highlighted the optimizations in the various user experience elements (copy, layout, design, calls-to-action…), from the perspective of consumer struggles. Baymard’s Usability research really compliments our other existing research tools.”
“Thank you. This was an excellent piece of work: professional, thorough, and actionable for the team. We're very happy with the work Baymard has done for us so far, and I hope we'll have the chance to work together again on future projects.”
“Damn. The reports that the @Baymard folks do cost money, but they're worth it.”
“It is immensely valuable having a thorough, independent study to help validate my work and in particular, help facilitate buy-off from stakeholders. Baymard has quickly become one of my most trusted resources for the UX/UI field.”
