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 185 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 14,000+ homepage and category navigation elements manually reviewed and scored by Baymard’s team of UX researchers, along with more than 8,000+ categorized best and worst practice implementation examples from leading e-commerce sites (all categorized and performance verified).
The 3,600+ UX performance scores for the benchmarked sites’ navigation is plotted in the interactive scatterplot above.
The Homepage & Category UX performance for the average top-grossing US and European site is “acceptable”, made up of 28% “decent”, 45% “acceptable, 24% “mediocre”. There are almost no sites that perform either exceptionally well or exceptionally poorly here, making for a much more narrow spread compared to other parts of the online shopping experience. This also means that there are the fewest examples on either end of either massive performance issues, or “State of the Art” implementations.
In comparison, in most of the other e-commerce UX studies we’ve conducted at Baymard Institute the average UX performance only amounts to “mediocre”. For instance, in our Search UX, Product Details Page UX, and Mobile Web UX research themes the average site performance is significantly below acceptable. In other words, Homepage & Category navigation is the part of the user journey within e-commerce where the average site performs the best.
Even given the generally “acceptable” performance of sites, the benchmark dataset shows that there’s still room for improvements when looking within the specific topics of the user experience — in particularly the UX within Category Taxonomy, Main Navigation, and Intermediary Category Pages. 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 185 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.
39 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 39 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
- Overcategorization of the Product Catalog Can Lead to Abandonment (Yet 75% Get It Wrong)January 3, 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 88,000+ 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 88,000+ 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: 40 rounds of benchmarking the world’s 185 top-grossing e-commerce sites across all 650+ UX guidelines (130,000+ implementation examples and 195,000+ 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.
