Baymard: 2019 and 2020

With the end of 2019 nearing, here’s an overview of; our 10 most popular UX research articles in 2019, the new UX research and features we’ve added in 2019, and what new research we have planned for the first half of 2020.

10 Most Popular Articles in 2019

The 10 of the most popular articles on Baymard this year (perfect if you want to read some UX research during the holidays):

• 13 Design Patterns for Autocomplete Suggestions – 27% Get it Wrong

• Search UX: 6 Essential Elements for ‘No Results’ Pages

• 9 UX Requirements for Designing a User-Friendly Homepage Carousel – If You Need One

• Checkout Optimization: From 16 Form Fields to 8 Fields – a keynote presentation

• Self-Service UX: Integrate All Order Tracking Info and Events Within the E-Commerce Site Itself – 56% Don’t

• 3 UX Implementation Details for Designing User-Friendly ‘Compare’ Tools

• The ‘Order Returns’ Experience is Critical for Customer Retention — Yet 54% of Sites Have a Returns Interface with Substantial Issues

• Mobile E-Commerce UX: Deemphasize ‘Install App’ Ads or Avoid Them Entirely

• Self-Service UX: Distinguish Primary from Secondary Paths in the ‘My Account’ Drop-Down – 71% of Sites Don’t

• 5 ‘Order Review’ Implementations That Make Office Depot Best-in-Class

New UX Research & Features in 2019

141 New Mobile E-Commerce UX Guidelines

We’ve now analyzed the more than 2,500 mobile usability issues that occurred during our large-scale mobile usability testing, and have identified and published 141 new mobile e-commerce UX guidelines in Baymard Premium (access needed). This is our most comprehensive study to date and reveals new mobile user behavior specific to e-commerce, what mobile design patterns consistently perform well with users, along with where and how the mobile website needs to actively deviate from the desktop website.

The following UX research topics are now completed: Mobile Homepage, Mobile Main Navigation, Mobile Category Taxonomy, Mobile Product List Layout & Features, Mobile List Item Content, and Mobile Site-Wide Features & Elements.

4 New UX Benchmarks with 11,700+ New Examples for Search, Product Pages, Checkouts, and Self-Service

We’ve released four new UX benchmark databases on the topics ‘Search’, ‘Product Details Pages’, ‘Cart & Checkout’, and ‘Accounts & Self-Service’.

This provides you with 60 of the world’s largest e-commerce sites rated across the 343 research-based UX guidelines within these four topics, leading to 11,700+ new performance-verified best-practice UX examples, and 18,000+ new UX performance scores.

You can view the UX performance and case-study dataset in the Benchmark tool (partially free), and you can see the new page design examples from 60 leading e-commerce sites in the Page Design tool (partially free).

(If you already have Baymard Premium access, then the 11,700+ best practice examples and the performance scores are already embedded. We recommend you get an overview via ‘The Current State of E-Commerce UX Landscape’ analysis.)

9 Rounds of New Quantitative Research

During 2019 we’ve conducted 9 rounds of new quantitative research, providing you with new late-2019 stats on user preferences and behavior on topics like: why users abandon during the checkout flow (see Checkout intro), why users shop online instead of in physical stores (see Product Page intro), mobile app install and utilization rates (see guideline #930), what information types which will make users abandon the checkout (#731), which SSL and trust badges that give users the best sense of trust in a checkout flow (#587), how much more users rely on customer review averages if they have a higher number of votes (#517), how users actually “save” products they aren’t yet ready to purchase (#798).

’Guidelines by Industry’

We’ve also added a new way of navigating the 700+ UX research guidelines in Premium called “Guidelines by Industry”. This new feature shows you the 50-150 most important guidelines to read for sites in a given industry. It’s based on an analysis of the 57,000+ UX performance scores in our benchmark database, identifying “missed opportunities within the industry”.

The industry views available are: Mass Merchants, Home & Hardware, Sports Toys & Hobbies, Apparel & Accessories, Health & Beauty, Electronics & Office, Houseware & Furnishing, and Business-to-Business.

Additionally, 107 of 700+ the UX guidelines in the Premium research catalog are now verified and tagged as being “Low Cost” guidelines, as in, there’s 107 identified UX “quick wins”.

First Half of 2020

The next upcoming projects are:

• We have started a new round of mobile UX benchmarking, expected to be ready Q1 2020.
• Completely retooled UX scorecards and UX scoring logic for Baymard’s public and Premium benchmarks.
• Continue our existing mobile e-commerce UX research. The research team is currently working on ‘Mobile Product Pages’, ‘Mobile Search’, ‘Mobile Filtering’, and ‘Mobile Checkouts’.
• New UX benchmarks on ‘Homepage & Category’ navigation and ‘Product Listings & Filtering’.

Tip: You can see a full breakdown of all changes and a continuously updated roadmap on our new Roadmap & Changelog page, or subscribe to our Quarterly Newsletter to get 4 emails per year summarizing what new UX research we’ve released.

We’d like to thank all our customers and readers for a great 2019. Looking forward to a great 2020 with you!

– Christian, Jamie, and the entire Baymard team