Jobs: E-Commerce UX Benchmarker

Are you good at conducting heuristic UX evaluations of websites? Do you love paying attention to the smallest of UX/UI details?

We’re seeking two full-time remote UX Benchmarkers for our benchmarking team.

Baymard Institute is an independent research organization, specializing in conducting large-scale e-commerce UX research.

In this role you will be conducting extremely detailed heuristics UX evaluations of leading e-commerce sites – and your work will be published to and used by 10,000+ UX designers around the globe.

This position is relevant for people with a couple of years of UX-related work experience.

This is a remote full-time position that you can occupy anywhere. If you aren’t located in EMEA then 2-3 hours of daily overlap with Central European Time will be needed.

The Job

As a UX Benchmarker, you will be joining our team of 9 UX benchmarkers, who collectively are responsible for conducting Baymard’s UX benchmark databases. 90% of the job will be:

• Analyzing the UX of leading e-commerce sites – this is performed as an extremely detailed heuristic evaluation using a proprietary system and workflow, where Baymard’s research catalog of 700+ e-commerce UX parameters is used as the weighted heuristic.
• Typically you will benchmark 30-60 different e-commerce sites across a subset of the user journey. For example, benchmarking 50 checkout flows for 2 months, using Baymard’s 100 checkout UX guidelines.
• The websites you will be benchmarking are not clients/you will not present each UX evaluation to a single client. Instead, your benchmark will be published to subscription platform Baymard Premium where it’s used by more than 3,000 paying customers (typically UX designers). It will also be partially published for free to our more than 100,000 public readers (here and here).
• Defining and developing new industry benchmarks, where you will perform a focused benchmark on a specific industry, e.g. an electronics-, apparel-, luxury-, grocery-, etc. benchmark (see example).

Depending on your qualifications, other roles will be possible over time.

Qualifications

We’re looking for the following qualifications for this role:

(7/7) Finding attention to detail exciting – in every benchmark, you will be rating 30-50 websites across 100-700 detailed UX parameters. Each of these 700 parameters then has 4-7 defined implementation nuances the evaluation must account for. This requires an extreme level of attention to detail and excitement for exploring the smallest UI nuances of a site. Frankly, you have to be a bit of a “details nerd”. Our best benchmarkers know all 700 parameters by memory. (This skill/personal trait is more important than a lot of UX knowledge)

(6/7) Rigor over time – while the typical benchmark project of 50 sites lasts just around 2 months (you’ll, therefore, roughly, benchmark on a new site every day) – the benchmarking process itself and the underlying UX research dataset doesn’t change that much. So the UX benchmarker role requires that you have a high degree of stability and will find it exciting to look for the same set of 700+ e-commerce UX nuances all year round (although applying that dataset to a very broad variety of sites).

(3/7) Some understanding of UX and user behavior - in this role, you will not conduct usability testing yourself with end-users, but rather be performing heuristic evaluations – analyzing the UX of a website across Baymard’s 700+ parameters/heuristics. This role will require some preexisting experience within UX or usability testing. But because the 700 UX parameters are created by our separate usability testing research team, you do not need extensive work experience within UX design or UX research (although a plus) – but a desire to learn and read 100s of pages of UX research findings will be needed.

(2/7) Good understanding of web-jargon – being able to describe the differences between ‘auto-complete’, ‘auto-fill’, and ‘auto-correct’ on the spot will be a necessity when documenting your findings to our readers.

Each of the above qualifications is weighted, 7 is the highest.

(Note that this is not a UX Designer or a Usability Testing job. At Baymard we don’t perform any kind of client design or development work. So if you are looking for a UX designer role or a role with direct client relationships, this job is not for you. This is not a UX Researcher/Writer position either, so if you are looking to perform direct usability testing with end-users or want to write Baymard guidelines/articles, this job is not for you either. (Instead, sign up for our job alert as we do hire these types of roles from time to time).

Job Specs

• Salary: In accordance with qualifications, but typically in the range of EURO 35,000-45,000 per year before taxes, contributions, etc., and with 25 days of annual paid time off (invoiced as a contractor — except for UK and IE residents where we are a registered employer).
• Start date: as soon as possible.
• Location: this is a remote full-time position, but if you are not located in EMEA you need 2-3 hours daily overlap with Central European Time).
• Language: intermediary written and spoken English (non-native English is fine).
• Travel: is limited, expect only 0-2 weeks of travel each year.

How to Apply

If you’re interested in this position please apply by sending the following documents:

1. A cover letter (1-2 page PDF) – describing how you fit the role and qualifications. (Required.)
2. A resume (PDF) or a link to your LinkedIn profile – describing your background and past experience. (Required.)
3. Any samples or other documents; for example, heuristic evaluations you’ve performed, UX related articles you’ve written, designs you’ve created, etc. (Optional.)

We don’t have a UX Benchmarker position open right now, but to be notified about future positions at Baymard, then sign up for our job notification email (1-click unsubscribe + only 1 text e-mail per job posting).

Tip, if you want to prepare the best possible consider:

• familiarizing yourself with our UX Benchmark database and Page Design tool (the primary output of a benchmarker),
• watching this video explaining Baymard’s research approach,
• reading the “work values” section at the end of this page.

Sincerely,
Christian & the benchmark team at Baymard Institute

Referral bonus

If this job isn’t you, but you know someone who’ll be the perfect fit, please send them the link to this page. If we end up hiring the person you referred, we’ll give you a 1 year access to a Baymard Premium ‘Medium’ plan (normally $1560/year).

Key Work Values at Baymard

The following work values are central to us at Baymard and hopefully gives you an idea of our culture and what working at Baymard is like:

• Flat organization – Baymard is a small organization of just ~50 people. This means zero management layers between you and the final decision. You’ll have direct access to and impact on decision making.
• Lots of responsibility – From day 1 (OK, maybe day 2), you will be working on final products or services. We believe the best way to learn is to work on actual products and challenges, supplemented with rich early feedback.
• Long-term focus – Decisions are always based on their long term impact. We’re not interested in hunting after the next “quick win” — we want to make a lasting impact on the e-commerce industry and usually adopt a 5-year perspective in our decisions and projects.
• Remote from the ground up – 100% of the team works remotely. We’ve deliberately designed the organization around remote work. That said, we do bring the entire team together for a week once a year somewhere interesting in the world.
• Team of ‘subject matter’ nerds – Everyone geeks out a bit on their work interests. We love that, and once a week someone from the team gets the opportunity to do a 20-minute presentation on their latest obsession — whether it’s quasi-quantum-worlds, critical thinking, or the proper usage of hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes.
• Founders engaged in the product – We believe it is essential that those orchestrating the work of the organization are keenly in tune with all aspects of it. The two founders of Baymard have therefore performed every type of task in the organization themselves (from programming to UX testing), and continue to work directly on the product.
• Flexible hours – Beyond ensuring availability for meetings and a few hours of daily overlap with your colleagues, you are largely free to plan your own workweek. E.g., we have some that take a 2-hour break midday and then instead work in the evening, or only work half a Tuesday and then always work half a Saturday.
• Room for growth – We believe that everyone should be able to grow in their job — both as a professional and as a person. Therefore, each member of the team gets a clear, step-by-step overview of their progress, internal masterclasses, team summits, and more.