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Home & Hardware
Home & Hardware UX Research
Explore how shoppers find and evaluate tools, fixtures and home improvement products online. Baymard’s home and hardware research covers technical product information, filtering, comparisons and the purchase journey, with guidance for customers who bring different levels of practical knowledge.
Support the decisions behind a home improvement purchase
A home improvement purchase often depends on dimensions, materials or a technical requirement that shoppers may struggle to describe. The research examines how navigation, filters, specifications and imagery can help people find suitable products, compare alternatives and understand the details needed to make a confident choice.
Key UX challenges for home and hardware
Understandable technical filters
Explain unfamiliar terms in filter labels and options, helping shoppers narrow tools, fixtures and materials without needing specialist knowledge of every attribute.
Scannable specifications
Organize specifications so shoppers can locate and compare the dimensions, materials and technical details that determine whether a product meets their requirements.
Product scale in context
Show products beside familiar objects or in their intended setting, helping shoppers interpret physical size alongside measurements when assessing tools and home products.
Home and hardware research, in numbers
These figures describe the home and hardware research coverage, UX performance scores and example library.
490+
Home and hardware UX guidelines
7,000+
Home and hardware UX performance scores
6,000+
Home and hardware best-practice examples
Home & Hardware
The findings from Baymard’s large-scale testing of Home Improvement & Hardware sites provide you with 490+ UX guidelines, along with 7,000+ UX performance scores and 6,000+ best practice examples from Home Improvement & Hardware sites.
The UX research covers the entire online shopping experience, including:
- Best UX for critical aspects like filtering, product variations, shipping estimates, return concerns, PDP image gallery, spec sheets, reviews, etc.)
- How the UI can best support users’ need to understand the physical size and technical capabilities of the products (scale images, specs and jargon, comparison tools, feature callouts, reviews).
- How the site design can best support that users often research products extensively, incl. going off-site.
Build.com, Backdrop, Gamma.nl, Northern Tool, Home Depot, Lowe's,
8 × Themes
How the home and hardware research was conducted
The home and hardware research draws on usability testing and manual UX benchmarking of specialist stores and broader retailers. Source coverage includes Home Depot, Lowe’s, Build.com, Northern Tool and Grainger. The research considers both product finding and evaluation, including technical terminology, variations, specifications and comparison tasks across different product types.
Usability observations reveal where shoppers struggle to connect their requirements with the information a site provides. Researchers turn recurring findings into guidelines, and benchmarkers assess real implementations to produce performance scores and examples. Findings also draw on wider ecommerce research. Teams can use this evidence to make complex assortments easier to navigate and practical details easier to assess.
Explore home and hardware UX benchmarks
Browse examples of home and hardware sites supporting product discovery, technical evaluation and purchase decisions. The benchmark helps teams compare real approaches to common shopping tasks. A demo can connect those implementations with the research and guidelines behind them.
How teams use Baymard’s research
Testimonials
“The Baymard E-commerce Usability reports have proven to be a valuable resource for UX teams within our organisation both at group and operating company level. The reports contain precise, actionable insights and recommendations which are backed up by extensive research and data. The severity and frequency ratings have helped our development teams to prioritise which areas to improve first. The most recent improvements we’ve recommended from the Ecommerce Search report have been extremely well received by senior stakeholders and have already been fed into the backlog.”
Testimonials
“Baymard Institute reports are first-rate. I’ve successfully used several of them to make substantial and measurable improvements to ecommerce websites.”
Looking for an expert review of your site?
Baymard’s Home and hardware UX Audit applies the research to your site through an expert review with prioritized recommendations.
See the home and hardware research in action
Book a demo to explore the guidelines, examples and benchmarks relevant to your home and hardware customer experience.