Research Topic
Homepage & Category Navigation UX
How do users perceive your homepage and navigate your categories?
This study on e-commerce homepage and category navigation is the culmination of 2 years worth of usability testing and research, distilled into 45 usability guidelines.
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 45 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.
This page provides you an overview of Baymard’s research specific to Homepage & Category Navigation UX. All of this research is available as part of Baymard Premium.
The Current Homepage & Category Navigation UX Performance
To accompany the usability test sessions we’ve also benchmarked 197 top-grossing US and European e-commerce sites across each of the 45 Homepage & Category Navigation usability guidelines. This has resulted in a benchmark database with 13,000+ homepage and category navigation elements manually reviewed and scored by Baymard’s team of UX researchers, along with more than 7,000+ categorized best and worst practice implementation examples from leading e-commerce sites (all categorized and performance verified).
The UX performance scores from our most recent Homepage & Category UX benchmark update are plotted in the interactive scatterplot above.
The Homepage & Category Navigation desktop UX performance for the average top-grossing US and European site is “poor”, made up of 20% “decent”, 34% “mediocre”, 41% “poor” and 4% “below poor”. There are no sites that perform exceptionally well or even just well, however, there are 4% of sites that have massive performance issues within this area. Within each of the 4 subareas, there are a large number of sites that fall below poor.
Hence, the benchmark dataset shows that there’s great room for improvement when looking within the specific topics of the user experience — in particularly the UX within Category Taxonomy, Main Navigation, and Intermediary Category Pages, but also within Homepage where only just above 50% of sites deliver a “decent” or better UX performance.
The issues identified in these topics cause problems for many sites and include some “missed opportunities” for the e-commerce industry as a whole. (All areas explored in-depth in our full research catalog.)
This is a sub-set of the full benchmark which includes 197 e-commerce sites.
View our full UX benchmark
2,300+ Categorized ‘Homepage & Category Navigation’ Examples
FREE RESEARCH CONTENT
Explore annotated design patterns across 2,300+ examples of Homepage & Category Navigation 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 Homepage & Category Navigation design, and to get a feel for emerging trends in e-commerce navigation.
40 Research articles on ‘Homepage & Category’ UX
FREE RESEARCH CONTENT
We’ve released a small subset of the Premium research finding on homepage and navigation UX for free in these 40 articles:
- Provide a Hover Delay of 300–500 MS for Hover-Based Drop-Down Menus (60% Don’t)January 31, 2023Popular
- Make Product Categories the Top-Level Navigation Items on Mobile Sites (33% Don’t)January 24, 2023Popular
5 Research Reports on Homepage & Category Navigation UX
PAID RESEARCH CONTENT
All 45 Homepage & Category Navigation UX research findings are available as part of Baymard Premium, and are divided into the following 5 topics:
Homepage & Category Topics
Homepage
Homepage
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 Topics
Category Taxonomy
Category Taxonomy
The structural foundation of a site’s product categories, including information architecture, catalog breadth, and category naming.
Homepage & Category Topics
Main Navigation
Main Navigation
The visual design of an e-commerce site’s taxonomy, including mega drop-down menus, the visual hierarchy, and courtesy navigation.
Homepage & Category Topics
Intermediary Category Pages
Intermediary Category Pages
How Intermediary Category Pages can guide users toward better-defined categories and products using inspirational paths, featured products, and curated content.
Homepage & Category Topics
Site-Wide Layout
Site-Wide Layout
How general site-wide elements should be designed and positioned, including considerations on newsletter dialogs, ad positioning, footer, and return policy links.
Subscribe to Baymard Premium to access all of our Homepage & Category UX research
Get full access to all our Homepage & Category UX research reports, benchmarks, and page designs previewed here, along with our complete 650+ guidelines for Search, Product Listing, Product Details Page, Checkout, Accounts & Self-Service, and Mobile E-Commerce. Utilize our 110,000 hours of UX research to improve your Homepage & Category user experience and to document your UX decisions.
Test Methodology
This research on Homepage & Category UX is part of Baymard Institute’s full 110,000 hours of large scale research catalog, which is based on:
- Usability Testing: 22 rounds of qualitative usability testing with 3,600+ test subject/site sessions following the "Think Aloud" protocol (in-person 1:1 moderated lab usability testing).
- Manual benchmarking: 45 rounds of benchmarking the world’s 197 top-grossing e-commerce sites across all 650+ UX guidelines (140,000+ implementation examples and 215,000+ UX performance scores).
- In-lab eye-tracking testing.
- Quantitative studies: 10 studies with a total of 16,425 participants.
Baymard’s research methodology is described in detail here.
UX Audit Service
GET YOUR E-COMMERCE NAVIGATION REVIEWED
What are the 15 most important changes you can make to your homepage and category design?
We will put together a detailed 40-page report of the 15 most important usability improvements you can make to your e-commerce homepage design and category taxonomy.
