This is a case study of Ulta Beauty’s e-commerce user experience (UX) performance. It’s based on an exhaustive performance review of 516 design elements. 250 other sites have also been benchmarked for a complete picture of the e-commerce UX landscape.
Ulta Beauty’s overall e-commerce UX performance is mediocre. This is mainly due to perfect Site-Wide Features while simultaneously having poor Homepage & Category and Customer Accounts.
First benchmarked in September 2021, and reviewed 3 times since then, most recently in February 2023.
Overall UX Performance
832 Guidelines · Performance:
Desktop Web
458 Guidelines · Performance:
Homepage & Category
31 Guidelines · Performance:
On-Site Search
46 Guidelines · Performance:
Product Lists & Filtering
85 Guidelines · Performance:
Product Page
101 Guidelines · Performance:
Cart & Checkout
118 Guidelines · Performance:
Customer Accounts
38 Guidelines · Performance:
Site-Wide Features
12 Guidelines · Performance:
Order Tracking & Returns
27 Guidelines · Performance:
Mobile Web
374 Guidelines · Performance:
To learn how we calculate our performance scores and read up on our evaluation criteria and scoring algorithm head over to our Methodology page.
The scatterplot you see above is the free version we make public to all our users. If you wish to dive deeper and learn about each guideline and even review your own site you’ll need to get premium access.
21 pages of Ulta Beauty’s e-commerce site, marked up with 271 best practice examples:
13 pages of Ulta Beauty’s e-commerce site, marked up with 139 best practice examples:
Every week, we publish a new article on how to build “state of the art” e-commerce experiences — here’s 5 popular ones:
Drop-Down Usability: When You Should (and Shouldn’t) Use Them
Format the “Expiration Date” Fields Exactly the Same as the Physical Credit Card (72% Don’t)
PDP UX: Core Product Content Is Overlooked in ‘Horizontal Tabs’ Layouts (Yet 28% of Sites Have This Layout)
Form Field Usability: Avoid Extensive Multicolumn Layouts (16% Make This Form Usability Mistake)
Form Usability: Getting ‘Address Line 2’ Right
See all 403 articles in the full public archive.