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Homepage & Category Usability
Exploring the customer’s product finding experience
An original research study by Baymard Institute
This study on e-commerce homepage and category navigation is the culmination of 2 years worth of usability testing and research, distilled into 79 usability guidelines.
Full access to the Homepage & Category Usability study includes:
- Usability Report – 79 actionable guidelines detailed in 399 pages based on years of e-commerce navigational research.
- Benchmark Database – 100 case studies, more than 7,900 UX performance scores, and 4,700 categorized best practice implementation examples.
This research-based and pragmatic toolset will help you achieve the best possible homepage and category navigation 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: 79 Guidelines for Homepage & Category Navigation Perfection
Product finding is key to any e-commerce business – after all, if users can’t find it, they can’t buy it.
This original usability study focuses on how users navigate, find and select products on e-commerce sites. A group of users age 21-56 were recruited to test 19 of the leading e-commerce websites across 8 different verticals (mass merchants, apparel, electronics, jewelry, home decoration, toys & gifts, specialty equipment, and health & drugs). The tested pages and design elements include the homepage, category navigation, site taxonomy, category pages, and cross-navigation.
Throughout the test sessions, the subjects would repeatedly abandon sites because they were unable to find the products they were looking for. Indeed, the subjects encountered 900+ usability-related issues, and this is despite testing multi-million-dollar sites. All of these usability issues have been distilled into 79 concise usability guidelines that will help you design a user-friendly homepage and category structure so your customers can find the products they’re looking for.
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 8 pages
- Benchmark Analysis 8 pages
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Guideline categories:
- Homepage 55 pages 13 guidelines on homepage structure, design, carousels, personalization and promotions
- Category Taxonomy 63 pages 13 guidelines on e-commerce category structure, information architecture, catalog breadth, and category naming
- Main Navigation 60 pages 16 guidelines on e-commerce navigation design, mega drop-down menus, visual hierarchy, and courtesy navigation
- Intermediary Category Pages 41 pages 7 guidelines on inspirational paths, featured products, and curated content
- Product Lists 90 pages 13 guidelines on grid and list view, pagination, items per page, sorting design and filtering features
- Site-Wide Layout 37 pages 10 guidelines on newsletter dialogs, ad positioning, footer, and return policy links
- Cross-Navigation & -Selling 26 pages 7 guidelines on scope jumping, breadcrumbs, cross- and up-selling, and content sections
- Case Studies 13 reviews Including Wayfair, L.L. Bean, Victoria’s Secret, Williams-Sonoma, Lowe’s, Macy’s, Office Depot, Sephora, etc
- Checklist for all 79 guidelines 5 pages
- Methodology, Authors, etc. 5 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: Is Your Navigation Experience Better than Macy’s or Etsy’s?
Based on the findings from the research study we’ve benchmarked the homepage, main nav. menu, site taxonomy, and category page implementation of 50 top grossing US e-commerce sites, across multiple years. This provides you with a comprehensive benchmark database with 550 manually reviewed pages, more than 1,600 screenshots, and 4,500+ categorized implementation examples of the 79 usability guidelines presented in the report.
When you purchase the homepage and category usability study you get full access to this benchmark database.
Furthermore the benchmark database include tools that allow you to review your own site (or your client’s) and see how it stacks up against the competition.
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 Homepage & Category Usability | Nielsen Norman Group E-Commerce User Experience | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pages: | 99 pages | 399 pages | 2,140 pages |
| Guidelines: | - | 79 guidelines | 874 guidelines |
| Source: | Author’s thoughts | User testing | User testing |
| Benchmark: | No | Yes, 100 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 homepage and category design today at just $2.5 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 Homepage & Category Usability
- ISBN: 978-87-994365-8-3
- Version: 2.0.2 (updated February 2017)
- Delivery: Instant PDF-download (DRM-free), 117mb
- Content: 399 pages, 79 guidelines
Benchmark details
The benchmark database has four components:
- Review: Interactive checklist for reviewing your own sites
- Guidelines: 79 usability guidelines with examples from the 100 benchmarked sites
- Site reviews: Case studies of the top 100 grossing e-commerce sites
- Page types: Navigate the homepage and category designs 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.
Baymard Institute’s research is used by:
“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.”
“Baymard have been a great resource in helping us improve the customer experience. We are continually applying these best practices to our sites.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
