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Product Page Usability
Exploring the customer’s product page experience
Just released – May 17th, 2017
This product page study provides you with 2 years’ worth of usability testing and research on product details pages, all condensed into 98 usability guidelines.
Full access to this Product Page Usability study includes:
- Usability Report – 98 actionable design guidelines detailed in 622 pages, based on years of e-commerce product page usability research.
- Benchmark Database – 60 case studies, more than 5,800 UX performance scores, and 4,100+ categorized product page implementation examples.
This research-based and pragmatic toolset will help you achieve the best possible product page design, 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: 98 Research-Driven Guidelines on Perfecting Product Pages
It’s often on the product page where users make up their mind on whether or not they want to purchase the featured product. This makes the product page layout, design, and features, the centerpiece of the user’s e-commerce experience. At the same time, the product page layout and features are under a lot of strain as they’re largely a template reused for almost every single product on the site.
This original usability study focuses on exactly how users interpret and interact with the product page on e-commerce sites. The findings presented in this 622-page report are based on Baymard’s large-scale qualitative testing of e-commerce product pages, along with an additional large-scale eye-tracking test.
Throughout the test sessions, users would repeatedly abandon sites due to issues with the product page layout, content types, or features. Indeed, the test subjects encountered 1,300+ usability issues, despite testing the product pages of multi-million-dollar sites like Sears, Home Depot, Bose, Sephora, Lowe’s, etc.
In this report, we have distilled all 1,300+ product page usability issues encountered by the test subjects into 98 product page user experience guidelines, and prioritized them by UX impact – providing you with a concise set of design guidelines that will help you improve the performance of your product pages.
What you’ll get in the Product Page Usability 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 10 pages
- Benchmark Analysis 12 pages
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Guideline categories:
- Product Page Layout 57 pages 8 guidelines on product page layouts; ‘Horizontal Tabs’, ‘Sticky TOCs’, ‘Collapsed Sections’, ‘One Long Page’, etc.
- Product Images 55 pages 9 guidelines on how users inspect product images, the 7 different image types e-commerce sites need, number of images, etc.
- Image Gallery User Interface 54 pages 10 guidelines on image gallery design, image navigation, methods of zoom, carousels, overlays, default image and size, etc.
- Product Video & 360-Views 20 pages 4 guidelines on product videos and interactive ‘360-View’ features; incl. video content, structure, placement, and video player features.
- The ‘Buy’ Section 62 pages 11 guidelines on the design and position of elements such as ‘Add to Cart’ button, prices & discounts, quantity field, ‘Out of Stock’, etc.
- Shipping, Returns, & Gifting 48 pages 7 guidelines on shipping and return information at the product page, ‘Free Shipping’ tiers, gifting, and ‘Find in Store’ features.
- Product Variations 46 pages 9 guidelines on selecting color and size variations, content across variations, product customizations and personalizations.
- Product Description 38 pages 7 guidelines on product information and descriptions, the type of content needed, text styling, sub-titles, product headlines, etc.
- Product Specifications Sheet 27 pages 5 guidelines on spec sheet layout, specs in table vs. product description, help features, post-processing of vendor data, etc.
- User Reviews 86 pages 13 guidelines on user reviews, the review submission form, review filtering, sorting & navigation, rating distribution summaries, etc.
- Auxiliary Content 26 pages 5 guidelines Q&A, FAQs, product manuals, social media tools, and expert generated content.
- Cross-Sells & Cross-Navigation 55 pages 10 guidelines on cross-sells design, placement, and logic, cross-navigation elements, ‘Recently Viewed Products’, etc.
- Case Studies 12 reviews Including Best Buy, REI, Lowe’s, Northern Tool, Williams-Sonoma, ASOS, and Home Depot
- Checklist for all 98 guidelines 9 pages
- Methodology, Authors, etc. 5 pages
“Baymard have been a great resource in helping us improve the customer experience. We are continually applying these best practices to our sites.”
Benchmark: Are Your Product Pages UX Better Than Macy’s or Nike’s?
Based on the findings of this product page research study we’ve also benchmarked the product details pages of 60 top-grossing e-commerce sites in the US and Europe. This provides you with the most comprehensive product page UX database in the world with 285 manually reviewed pages, more than 1,700 screenshots, and 4,100+ categorized implementation examples of the 98 product page usability guidelines presented in the report.
When you purchase the product page usability study you get full access to this benchmark database.
Furthermore the benchmark database includes tools that allow you to review your own (or your clients’) product page UX and see how it stacks up against the competition.
What you’ll get in the Product Page Usability 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 Product Page Usability | Nielsen Norman Group E-Commerce User Experience | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pages: | 99 pages | 622 pages | 2,140 pages |
| Guidelines: | - | 98 guidelines | 874 guidelines |
| Source: | Author’s thoughts | User testing + Eye-tracking | User testing |
| Benchmark: | No | Yes, 60 sites reviewed | No |
| Review tool: | No | Yes, interactive auditing 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 product page usability report and benchmark database for $200, and start improving your product page layout, design, and features, at only $2 per actionable usability 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: Product Page Usability
- ISBN: 978-87-994365-9-0
- Published: May 2017
- Delivery: Instant PDF-download (DRM-free), 221mb
- Content: 622 pages, 98 guidelines
Benchmark details
The benchmark database has four components:
- Review: Interactive checklist for reviewing your own sites
- Guidelines: 98 usability guidelines with examples from the 60 benchmarked sites
- Top 60: Case studies of 60 top grossing e-commerce sites
- Page type: Navigate the product page designs by page element
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.”
“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.”
“Damn. The reports that the @Baymard folks do cost money, but they're worth it.”
