Research Topic
E-Commerce Search UX
How do users construct product search queries and navigate search results on e-commerce sites?
This study is based on extensive usability research on how users construct product search queries and navigate the results on e-commerce sites – condensed into 31 search UX guidelines.
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 search-specific usability issues arose during testing. All these issues have been analyzed and distilled into 31 guidelines on search usability.
From this research study, you’ll learn exactly what users expect as they perform searches 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 search experience for your users. After all, if users can’t find what they are searching for, they can’t buy it from you.
While many of the 31 guidelines will be on search logic, more than half of the guidelines are simple design and interaction changes for the search field, autocomplete functionality, and search results as these elements proved to have just as crucial an impact on the user’s ability to find what they were looking for.
This page provides you with an overview of our research specific to E-Commerce Search UX. All of this research is available as part of Baymard Premium.
The Current E-Commerce Search UX Performance
To accompany the usability test sessions we’ve also benchmarked 257 leading US and European e-commerce sites across each of the On-site Search usability guidelines. Our Search UX benchmark database contains 5,000+ search elements that have been manually reviewed and scored by Baymard’s team of UX researchers, along with 4,500+ worst and best practice examples from leading e-commerce sites (all categorized and performance verified).
Desktop Web On-Site Search
26 Guidelines
Search Query Types
8 Guidelines
Search Autocomplete
8 Guidelines
Search Form & Search Results
10 Guidelines
Mobile Web On-Site Search
28 Guidelines
Search Query Types
8 Guidelines
Search Autocomplete
7 Guidelines
Search Form & Results
13 Guidelines
The UX performance scores from our most recent Search UX benchmark update are plotted in the interactive scatterplot above.
The current overall lacking state of e-commerce search shouldn’t be understood as “users cannot use search on the benchmarked sites.” However, it is a clear indication that e-commerce search isn’t as easy to use as it should be and that users’ search success rates can be improved dramatically on many sites – even when looking at 257 major e-commerce sites. Generally, a high prioritization of the search experience is needed to catch up with those few sites who have a years-long head start, but it is achievable. Furthermore, as the poor overall state of search is present within all industries, most sites will have an opportunity to create a true competitive advantage by offering a vastly superior search experience compared to that of their competitors.
Since a poor-performing search experience can, aesthetically, look just as good as a high-performing search experience, gauging one’s own or a competitor’s search experience will require extensive testing and evaluation.
This is a subset of the full benchmark which includes 257 e-commerce sites.
View our full UX benchmark
View article “Deconstructing E-Commerce Search UX: The 8 Most Common Search Query Types
3,000+ Categorized Search Examples
FREE RESEARCH CONTENT
Explore design patterns across 3,000+ examples of e-commerce search designs and features from leading e-commerce sites, organized into 4 different page types. This is a great way to get inspiration for your own search design, and to get a feel for emerging trends in e-commerce search.
25 Research Articles on E-Commerce Search UX
FREE RESEARCH CONTENT
We’ve released a small subset of the Premium research finding on e-commerce search UX for free in these 25 articles:
Mobile App UX Trends: The Current State of Mobile App UX (10 Common Pitfalls & Best Practices)
October 24, 2024 Popular
2024 E-Commerce Product Finding: Expanded and Updated Research Findings
September 17, 2024
Deconstructing E-Commerce Search UX: The 8 Most Common Search Query Types (41% of Sites Have Issues)
September 12, 2024 Popular
Always Copy the Active Autocomplete Suggestion to the Search Field (58% Don’t)
August 27, 2024
5 Research Reports on Search UX
PAID RESEARCH CONTENT
All 31 Search UX research findings are available as part of Baymard Premium, and are divided into the following 5 reports (195 pages of research findings in total):
On-Site Search Topics
Search Query Types
On-Site Search Topics
Search Form & Logic
On-Site Search Topics
Search Autocomplete
On-Site Search Topics
Results Logic & Guidance
On-Site Search Topics
Results Layout & Filtering
Subscribe to Baymard Premium to access all of our Search UX research
Get full access to all our E-Commerce Search UX research reports, benchmarks, and page designs previewed here, along with our complete 650+ guidelines for Homepage & Category Navigation, Product Listing, Product Details Page, Checkout, Accounts & Self-Service, and Mobile E-Commerce. Utilize our 150,000+ hours of UX research to improve your On-Site Search user experience and to document your UX decisions.
Test Methodology
This research on Search UX is part of Baymard Institute’s full 150,000+ hours of large-scale research catalog, which is based on:
- Usability Testing: 25 rounds of qualitative usability testing with 4,400+ test participant/site sessions following the "Think Aloud" protocol (in-person 1:1 moderated lab usability testing).
- Manual benchmarking: 54 rounds of benchmarking the world’s 257 leading e-commerce sites across all 650+ UX guidelines (175,000+ implementation examples and 275,000+ UX performance scores).
- In-lab eye-tracking testing.
- Quantitative studies: 12 studies with a total of 20,240 participants.
Baymard’s research methodology is described in detail here.
UX Audit Service
GET YOUR SEARCH EXPERIENCE REVIEWED
What are the 15 most important changes you can make to your e-commerce search engine and interface?
We will put together a detailed 40-page report of the 15 most important usability improvements you can make to your e-commerce search design and logic.
What Our Clients Are Saying
“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.”
“Baymard has been a great resource in helping us improve the customer experience. We are continually applying these best practices to our sites.”
“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.”
“Thanks again for the great work on our checkout project. Our whole group found it incredibly insightful. We’re applying the suggestions you provided to our new checkout design which launches at the end of the month! One of my colleagues was also interested in your group’s competitive expertise with regard to responsive web and native apps.”
“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.”
“Thank you very much for the 7 usability audits of our country-specific sites. The audits have provided us with specific and actionable advice, allowed us to prioritize development resources, and enabled us to compare UX performance between the 7 different country-specific sites, and against State of the Art implementations. The audit itself is done really professionally, and the recommendations contain actionable and insightful information.”
“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 complements our other existing research tools.”
“Thank you, this was really insightful!”
“We’ve received some awesome feedback from our Merchant Success team as well as our merchants about all of the UX Audits we’ve had thus far with Baymard. Thank you so much to you and your team for all of your hard work. The pilot with Baymard has been going fantastic and I’m really excited with all that we’re learning! You have an amazing platform, team and super helpful data base for us to work with.”