Learn all about e-commerce website dos and don’ts with me.
Welcome to my Baymard Cliff Notes series! In my free time, I’m embarking on a self-imposed quest to get UX Certified by Baymard to improve my UX knowledge and become a better Content Strategist and Design Partner.
My quest entails taking 6 exams that cover 6 major UX themes; Homepage & Category Navigation, On-site Search, Product Lists & Filtering, Product Details Page, Cart & Checkout, and Mobile E-Commerce.
Baymard bases its study material and exams on its extensive (78,000+ hours) research on large-scale e-commerce UX findings. You know what that means, I’ll be doing a lot of reading!
To help me study and to share out what I’m learning, I’ll be publishing my weekly study notes so they can help you whether you’re a UX designer, UI designer, product manager, web developer, or e-commerce site owner.
Alright, let’s get into it.
UX Ecommerce Homepage Best Practices
UX performance
- Most sites perform just above acceptable.
Inferring types of sites
- Generally, users perform a scroll and scan of the homepage to get an overview of the site. 25% of users do this consistently on desktop and 70% on mobile.
- Zappos case study: Users often underestimate a store's product range when only one type of product is shown on the home page and leave the site much faster.
- Wayfair case study: 30–40% of the product categories should be shown to indicate the type of site for users.
- Products don’t have to be clickable but need to set the right expectations and impressions.
- Consider promoting the most critical categories on the homepage — helps users with navigational shortcuts and gives visibility.
- Displaying primary categories on the homepage works best on mobile. Ex. Build.com, Amazon, Williams-Sonoma.
Deal Scopes
- Users casually scan web pages, especially homepages.
- Important deals & sales should be promoted on the homepage, but the best way to promote them…
