[VIP] Baymard Institute: E-Commerce Search Usability - An Original UX Research Study

How do users construct product search queries and navigate search results on e-commerce sites?

Oct 27, 2022 - 12:21

Jan 30, 2023 - 01:02

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[VIP] Baymard Institute: E-Commerce Search Usability - An Original UX Research Study

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This study is based on extensive usability research on how users construct product search queries and navigate the results on e-commerce sites – condensed into 49 search UX guidelines.

A group of users age 21-56 were recruited to test 19 leading e-commerce sites across 8 different verticals. Despite testing multi-million dollar sites, more than 700 search-specific usability issues arose during testing. All these issues have been analyzed and distilled into 49 guidelines on search usability.

From this research study you’ll learn exactly what users expect as they perform searches on e-commerce sites, what typically goes wrong in the process, why it goes wrong, and exactly what changes to make to avoid these issues. In short: how to design a high-performing search experience for your users. After all, if users can’t find what they are searching for, they can’t buy it from you.

While many of the 49 guidelines will be on search logic, more than half of the guidelines are simple design and interaction changes for the search field, autocomplete functionality, and the search results page, as these elements proved to have just as crucial an impact on the user’s ability to find what they were looking for.

This page provides you an overview of our research specific to E-Commerce Search UX. All of this research is available as part of Baymard Premium.

The Current E-Commerce Search UX Performance

During our large scale Search usability study, the test subjects were observed to rely heavily on e-commerce search queries that included either a Theme, Feature, or Symptom, yet most of 19 tested multi-million dollar sites had poor support for these query types. Even among the top 185 grossing US and European e-commerce sites, only 34% support such search queries.

In fact, search support is so poor that 31% of all product finding tasks ended in vain when users tried using search. And among the top 185 e-commerce sites, a whopping 70% of the search engines are unable to return relevant results for product type synonyms – requiring users to search using the exact same jargon as the site – while 34% of the sites don’t return useful results when users search for a model number or misspell just a single character in a product title.

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Our Search UX benchmark database contains 5,300 search elements that have been manually reviewed and scored by Baymard’s team of UX researchers, with an additional 2,400 best- and worst-practice examples from 185 top-grossing e-commerce sites in the US and Europe.

The current overall lacking state of e-commerce search shouldn’t be understood as “users cannot use search on the benchmarked sites.” However, it is a clear indication that e-commerce search isn’t as easy to use as it should be and that users’ search success rates can be improved dramatically on most sites – even when looking at 185 major e-commerce sites. Generally, a high prioritization of the search experience is needed to catch up with those few sites who have a years-long head start, but it is achievable. Furthermore, as the poor overall state of search is present within all industries, most sites will have an opportunity to create a true competitive advantage by offering a vastly superior search experience compared to that of their competitors.

Since a poor-performing search experience can, aesthetically, look just as good as a high-performing search experience, gauging one’s own or a competitor’s search experience will require extensive testing and evaluation.

This is a sub-set of the full benchmark which includes 185 e-commerce sites.

· View our full UX benchmark

· View article “Deconstructing E-Commerce Search – The 12 Query Types

5 Research Reports on Search UX

PAID RESEARCH CONTENT

All 49 Search UX research findings are available as part of Baymard Premium, and are divided into the following 5 reports (195 pages of research findings in total):