I do conversion rate optimization for ecommerce and Baymard is an extraordinarily valuable resource. If you're doing any work in ecomm or b2c, it's well worth the premium subscription price.
I think most ecommerce problems stem from these things:
1) Too much reliance on platform's opinions / defaults or the inability to technically overcome the usability concerns the platform presents for your implementation.
2) Uninformed design decisions. That is decisions that aren't backed by user research, data, etc. While ecommerce stores share tons of commonalities, the product offerings are unique and present different challenges/needs/etc. from other shops.
3) Brand getting in the way.
Baymard is a big boon for #2 because it takes data that is very expensive to get and makes it easily and cheaply accessible. Rather than focus your research efforts on large-scale ecommerce concerns, you can focus them more on your core differences. It also helps provide justification for #1 and helps inform difficult conversations about #3. Self-servingly, I'll say that CRO work helps take these things a step further and provide further validation or help answer difficult questions before investing too many resources.
At one point I also specialized in conversion-rate optimization for some very large eCommerce sites. If you can easily afford these, take advantage of them. There is no clearer guide for how to take a large eCommerce site from mediocre to being well-optimized for conversion.
As someone who hasn't heard of the Baymard Institute before, I was slightly confused at how their site was marketing their research as a product as opposed to sharing their research for academic and community engagement.
Although less research-based, I am a big fan of the UX Stack Exchange (https://ux.stackexchange.com/) for informing decisions on UI/UX design details; the answers usually provide clear justification and diagrams describing possible solutions.
Shameless plug: I’ve been a “technical” UX person for my whole career, and a big fan of (and trained by) the Nielsen Norman Group, mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
I’ve always enjoyed this “principles” approach to UX design and wrote “101 UX Principles” in 2018: https://uxbook.io - please do check it out, it’s ideal for non-UX specialists to understand the usability reasons behind common design decisions (and mistakes to avoid). Plug over!
Surprised to see all your text content is centre-aligned on mobile. Surely that’s not a UX best-practice as it degrades the “readability” of the content?
I found the centering making it more difficult to read. I also cannot overview the lists as well. Centering requires the reader to retarget their eyes at a different place every line.
In the praise section, I was confused about which text belonged to which person.
I really wish someone would publish this with larger examples. Checkouts are great, but some of us are working on larger systems with 25+ fields and most of that required, or dependantly required, and no, wizards apparently just confuse our users.
> It's a given that most users view the Web as a unified resource and combine sites for many of their tasks. Neither browsers nor sites have caught up with this new user behavior. Both will need to change in the coming years.
I hadn't heard of this one. Nielsen Norman [0] is another research institute for UX I've found very valuable. Much (or all?) of NN's research is freely available.
We really appreciate the kind words and knowing our research is useful to the UX community — that’s our whole purpose for existing. It's also greatly appreciated to get an outsiders perspective on what you are doing well and where you can improve.
Below I’ve tried to provide some additional context for some of the points in your article:
for your point “why aren’t there more Baymards”: as you point out conducting this much research takes time, and I guess that’s one of the reasons why more companies aren’t doing this. At Baymard we’ve so far spent around USD 5million on conducting the UX research needed to create the Baymard Premium research catalog, at the needed level of accuracy. All of this is self-financed UX researched, so it’s not client-specific projects that we’ve just repurposed (to ensure the research is unbiased, relevant, etc). That said, others wanting to do something similar, maybe don’t need the same level of accuracy and depth, as that’s really what makes it costly.
for your point “limitations: Context is Key”: our customers that have Baymard Premium research access generally have more data available than what we show in our public articles. In our Premium research access, all the UX research findings have meta-data to indicate the observed test severity and test frequency, there’s generally more user quotes, sometimes also test video clips, and there are some 35,000+ additional implementation examples.
for your point “limitations: Baymard has existed for 12 years” in our Premium research access we continually update all of the research with new examples, user behavior, etc. and we continually deprecate recommendations once our new test data shows the underlying user behavior has changed.
are there plans to add an option for individuals/academics like myself who would like to learn about design and UX and possibly doing our own studies based on your data?
I think both of your "Why?" posts can be answered by the viewpoint of the people you question, which would seem to be pessimism based on experience. In the parent to this "Why?" post the assumption is that HN readers are similarly pessimistic, which most of the comments in the subthread to your original statement that people would be surprised seems to bear out.
At first I was skeptical, but this is great stuff. For example https://baymard.com/blog/autocomplete-design gives 13 subtle ways to make autocomplete better, and I agree with all of them.
I know the folks at Baymard for quite a bit and love what they are doing. They aggregate years of research into their resources and for nearly every possible variation in the e-commerce world, they already have found an answer.
The tl;dr is that the Baymard institute publishes something on Medium limiting its distribution, the UX for finding out what the institute has to say (if you cannot read the article) is - read some blurb on Medium, search for name of institute to find website, go to website and decide if what they have to say is useful for you - or in the case where you go through HN or some other commentary on the article reading the comments first before searching for site.
Yeah same. The content on there is a mixed bag, they occasionally have stuff worth reading but there's also a lot of junk. Incognito mode doesn't seem to work for me anymore if I do feel the urge to see what it says. I guess if I delete my cookies it would work but then it's just too much of a hassle. The baymard site seems pretty interesting though.
I think most ecommerce problems stem from these things:
1) Too much reliance on platform's opinions / defaults or the inability to technically overcome the usability concerns the platform presents for your implementation.
2) Uninformed design decisions. That is decisions that aren't backed by user research, data, etc. While ecommerce stores share tons of commonalities, the product offerings are unique and present different challenges/needs/etc. from other shops.
3) Brand getting in the way.
Baymard is a big boon for #2 because it takes data that is very expensive to get and makes it easily and cheaply accessible. Rather than focus your research efforts on large-scale ecommerce concerns, you can focus them more on your core differences. It also helps provide justification for #1 and helps inform difficult conversations about #3. Self-servingly, I'll say that CRO work helps take these things a step further and provide further validation or help answer difficult questions before investing too many resources.