Baymard Institute

I am pleased to announce that Baymard Institute will be at the White & Private Label Expo in London this November. We’re looking forward to sharing our research to help the thousands of entrepreneurs, startups and retailers in attendance create high-converting, world-class ecommerce experiences. This event is part of our commitment to bringing Baymard’s research to you, in person. Throughout 2026, we are planning a full calendar of industry events. We have a dedicated team of speakers and UX experts available for keynotes and expert-led sessions focused on: - Conversion optimization: Solving the specific UX hurdles in navigation and checkout that prevent new brands from scaling. - Building trust: How to design credible, high-performing ecommerce experiences - Data-driven design: Moving beyond "best guesses" to implementation based on 200,000+ hours of testing. The White Label World Expo is an excellent opportunity to connect with those actively looking for the tools to take their businesses further. We look forward to a productive two days in London and to many more global engagements in the year ahead. Get your tickets here: https://lnkd.in/e3sWxAnU Stay up to date with Baymard’s events here: https://lnkd.in/ejb-aFNr

Two years into my journey at Foot Locker, I’m incredibly proud of the progress we’ve made as we continue raising the bar for our digital and omnichannel experiences. We closed out 2025 with our Mobile Product Page redesign being recognized in the Top 1% of UX performance in the Baymard Institute annual e-commerce awards. An honor to be recognized alongside brands we admire, and a reflection of the past two years spent reimagining the customer journey across our banners. Most recently, we launched the final phase of our global homepage redesign. This work introduced a modern, modular foundation for the site — along with updated typography, new interaction patterns, and elevated experience design. Together, these changes create expressive storytelling moments and enable more flexible digital merchandising. A huge shout out to the Experience Design team and our partners across Product and Engineering for their creativity, execution and collaboration. Grateful for the leadership and continued support of Avery Worthing-Jones, Andrew Rauch & Justin Daniels in ensuring the customer remains at the heart of everything we build. 👟✨

Our latest benchmark reveals that up to 62% of mobile ecommerce sites have a "mediocre" or worse product page UX. Even on desktop, more than half of the leading US and European sites fail to reach a "decent" performance level. Users are abandoning perfectly good products. Not because they don't want them, but because avoidable UX friction got in the way. The research team here at Baymard Institute manually analyzed 155+ major ecommerce sites and generated 30,000+ performance scores to map out the current landscape. The findings are clear: - Desktop is struggling: Only 48% of sites achieve a "decent" or "good" rating. - Mobile is lagging: 62% of mobile sites fall into the "mediocre or worse" category. - Apps are the bottom tier: Only 36% provide a "decent" user experience. - The "Perfect" Score remains elusive: Not a single site in our benchmark has achieved a "perfect" or "state-of-the-art" implementation yet. We’ve distilled our findings into 10 research-backed best practices that any ecommerce team can apply to reduce abandonment and boost confidence. Whether it's refining image galleries or optimizing technical specs, these changes are what separate the top 1% from the rest of the pack. Read the full analysis and get the 10 best practices here: https://lnkd.in/ef5WFHFq #ux #ecommerceux #ecommerce #uxresearch

One of the greatest things about the Baymard Ecommerce UX Awards is getting to see how the gold standard is put into practice by the world’s leading ecom teams. Baymard Institute recently had the pleasure of visiting Adidas at their headquarters in Amsterdam to personally congratulate them on their win. Here are some photos of the team looking (rightfully!) proud of their achievement. What makes the Adidas approach so impressive is how they use Baymard as a true extension of their research arm. They are able to bridge resource gaps, deep-dive into high friction UX areas and validate their work while enabling stakeholder sign-off. We established the Baymard Ecommerce UX Awards to move beyond subjective ecommerce design. Our team has invested over 200,000 hours manually auditing 400+ global sites against 500 rigorous guidelines to identify the true top 1%. Adidas hasn't just built a great site; they’ve built a research-backed, world-class experience that sets the bar for the entire industry. You can find the full list of winners and see who else made the top 1% here: https://lnkd.in/eVFpkdjx

Yesterday we announced the UX-Ray 2.0 native Figma Plugin. There’s been an amazing response already, and it’s exciting to see so many users moving away from costly "gut-feeling" decisions. I’ve witnessed talented UX/UI designers get struck by unfair expectations: you're expected to ship high-converting experiences, but at lightning speed, which doesn’t allow the time or budget required for primary research. That is when intuition reliance happens, and the "subjective feedback loop" begins. Design approvals stall because everyone in the room has a different opinion, and often those are not backed by usability research. We built the UX-Ray 2.0 Figma plugin to end the guesswork. Simply select a Figma frame to scan it against Baymard Institute's 200,000+ hours of UX research: - Identify critical usability issues and prioritize them by impact without ever leaving your Figma canvas.  - Link any UI component to validated UX best practices to secure faster stakeholder buy-in.  - Scan screenshots of other sites to see which designs actually follow industry standards and which are aesthetically pleasing, but underperforming. Essentially, you are getting our dedicated team of researchers acting as an extension of your own expertise. We want to help your team make informed decisions, whether you’re doing a full overhaul or a minor feature tweak. If you haven't tried it yet, I'd love to hear how it impacts your workflow. Install the UX-Ray 2.0 Figma plugin here: https://lnkd.in/e5mzW-GT

UX-Ray 2.0 is officially a Figma Plugin. Now, the most comprehensive ecommerce UX database lives exactly where you work. What this means for your workflow:  ✅ Scan design frames: Select any frame in Figma and click "Scan" to instantly flag usability issues.  ✅ Evidence on the canvas: Every recommendation is backed by 200,000+ hours of research. Link your UI components to objective data in seconds. ✅ Competitor analysis: Drop a screenshot of a competitor’s page into Figma, scan it, and see exactly where they’re winning (or failing) against industry standards.  ✅ Kill subjectivity: Stop defending designs with "I think..." and start using "Baymard research proves..." Shift your process from intuition-based to evidence-backed without ever leaving your Figma file. 💡 Learn more about the Plugin here: https://lnkd.in/eaKSucWD 👉 Install the UX-Ray 2.0 Plugin here: https://lnkd.in/eskGAkkv #figmaplugin #uxresearch

Excited to be running a workshop at UX Rotterdam Conference on April 17th 🎤 Strategic Storytelling: How to Persuade, Inspire, and Move Ideas Forward The difference between polite nods and real decisions often isn't the presentation itself. It's what happens before you ever open your slides. In this hands-on workshop, I'll share frameworks I've developed through 200+ high-stakes presentations with design and product teams at Google, Amazon, Meta, and Stripe. We'll work on: → Pre-selling techniques that turn skeptics into advocates before the meeting even starts  → Understanding what matters to your audience so you can tailor your message to land  → Using the Discovery Method to structure your narrative so your audience thinks with you, not against you You'll leave with a ready-to-use narrative for your next design review, roadmap pitch, or research readout. 📝 This isn't theory. These are battle-tested frameworks for when the stakes are high and you need buy-in to move forward. Thanks Nauko Leong for having me! See you in Rotterdam 🇳🇱👋

☕️ Weekend Reading: Is Your AI Tool a UX Liability? The market is currently flooded with AI-powered UX tools promising "instant audits" and "automated heuristics." But there is a growing accountability gap that teams can no longer afford to ignore. For this week’s Weekend Reading, we’re sharing a deep-dive discussion between Baymard Institute co-founders Christian Holst and Jamie Holst and the team at Nielsen Norman Group. If an AI tool is 70% accurate, it sounds like a productivity win. However, in a checkout or product page environment, that means 30% of its suggestions could be "false positives". Ultimately, these are recommendations that may actively damage your conversion rate, as well as your user trust. Without manual verification, you’re essentially gambling with your revenue. In this episode, Christian and Jamie explain the philosophy behind our UX-Ray tool: - We intentionally limited UX-Ray to a specific subset of our guidelines to maintain a 95%+ accuracy rate. - We use probabilistic AI for what it's best at (identifying design patterns) but rely on deterministic, research-backed logic for the actual evaluation. - We advocate for a shift in the industry where vendors must disclose their error rates and limitations. Before integrating AI into your UX workflow, ask the hard questions: - How is the accuracy of the output measured? - What are the known limitations? - Where does the GenAI end and the research begin? Read the full summary or listen to the podcast episode here: https://lnkd.in/e4Jzk7sQ #weekendreading #uxresearch #ecommerceux

We just wrapped 3,000+ hours of new UX research specifically for Health and Beauty websites. We tested 18 Health and Beauty e-commerce sites, spanning three categories — Direct Brand, Specialty Retailers, and Mass Retailers. During testing, end-users encountered 1,200+ medium-to-severe usability issues, which we distilled into 490+ UX guidelines relevant to Health and Beauty websites. In this article, you can see 3 High-Level takeaways from this massive study: https://lnkd.in/e4DKUaWG