Exploring the customer’s product finding experience
A part of Baymard Premium access
This study on e-commerce homepage and category navigation is the culmination of 2 years worth of usability testing and research, distilled into 61 usability guidelines.
Full access to the Homepage & Category Usability study includes 5 reports with 61 actionable e-commerce navigation guidelines, and a benchmark database with 11,500+ UX performance scores and 5,700+ categorized best practice implementation examples.
(Beyond including full access to this Homepage & Category research study, the Baymard Premium access also include 6 additional studies (E-Commerce On-Site Search, Product Lists & Filtering, Product Details Pages, Cart & Checkout, Mobile E-Commerce, and Account & Self-Service) with a total of 700+ guidelines covered in 70 e-commerce UX research reports)
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.”
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 61 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.
“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.”
See All 7 Topics
Homepage & Category
Homepage
Homepage & Category
Homepage
42 Guidelines, 104 Pages
The primary objectives of a site’s homepage, the opportunities it can provide to both new and repeat users, the homepage structure & design, carousels, personalization, and promotions.
Homepage & Category
Category Taxonomy
Homepage & Category
Category Taxonomy
16 Guidelines, 92 Pages
The structural foundation of a site’s product categories, including information architecture, catalog breadth, and category naming.
Homepage & Category
Main Navigation
Homepage & Category
Main Navigation
17 Guidelines, 80 Pages
The visual design of an e-commerce site’s taxonomy, including mega drop-down menus, the visual hierarchy, and courtesy navigation.
Homepage & Category
Intermediary Category Pages
Homepage & Category
Intermediary Category Pages
7 Guidelines, 55 Pages
How Intermediary Category Pages can guide users toward better-defined categories and products using inspirational paths, featured products, and curated content.
Homepage & Category
Site-Wide Layout
Homepage & Category
Site-Wide Layout
18 Guidelines, 112 Pages
How general site-wide elements should be designed and positioned, including considerations on newsletter dialogs, ad positioning, footer, and return policy links.
Homepage & Category
Accessibility
Homepage & Category
Accessibility
19 Guidelines, 188 Pages
How to implement accessibility-compliance requirements for e-commerce sites including considerations for images, links, form fields, page setup, site structure, and overall visual design requirements.
Homepage & Category
Digital Subscription Services
Homepage & Category
Digital Subscription Services
23 Guidelines, 118 Pages
What digital subscription service sites need to provide for users, including what types of pages are needed, how access to specific content should be provided, and what information to include in and how to lay out the plan matrix.
“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.”
Based on the findings from the research study we’ve benchmarked the homepage, main nav. menu, site taxonomy, and category page implementation of 60 top grossing US and European e-commerce sites, across multiple years. This provides you with a comprehensive benchmark database with 750+ manually reviewed pages, more than 3,200 screenshots, and 5,700+ categorized implementation examples of the 61 usability guidelines presented in the 5 reports.
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.
“Excellent tool – looking forward to using it with our other sites and prototypes as they’re developed.”
Get instant access to the 5 e-commerce Homepage & Category usability reports (along with 76 other e-commerce UX research reports) and the full benchmark database with Baymard Premium access.
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.
“Baymard’s training provides the proper language and sound evidence to understand what it mean to create a truly usable interface in the ecommerce business.”
“I just wanted to take a minute to thank you for the amazing work on this audit. You should know that this has been very well received internally and there’s a lot of excitement around adopting the ideas you have shared.”
“My team loves Baymard Premium and it has become a valuable tool for us. We consult with a number of large brands and manage their eComm (both DTC and eRetail) and your data is amazing, it gives us all the testing data without having to run the tests ourselves. Our clients appreciate us having the depth of knowledge Baymard provides, we’ve used Baymard data multiple times to defend our recommendations and to inform our designs.”
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“Truly a great learning experience about almost every aspect of eCommerce and the steps you need to take to improve the shopping experience for your users. Everyone working with eCommerce should attend this course. Absolutely worth the investment!”