Christian Holst is the co-founder of Baymard Institute where he writes bi-weekly articles with their research findings on web usability and e-commerce optimization. He’s also the author of the E-Commerce Checkout Usability and Mobile E-Commerce Usability research reports.
Considering that most carousel implementations lack many usability details, one can understand why strong wording is often used in discussions about carousels. But there are alternatives to a home page carousel that both perform well and are vastly easier to implement. In this article, Christian Holst will go over the 10 implementation details he’s found that are required to make home page carousels perform acceptably with end users. He’ll outline how and why mobile and desktop implementations should differ and, lastly, suggest a simpler, problem-free alternative to home page carousels.
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Pagination is still the most popular way to load new items on a website. However, the usability test sessions found “Load more” buttons combined with lazy-loading to be a superior implementation, resulting in a more seamless user experience. In this article, Christian Holst will present Baymard Institute’s usability research findings for both “Load more” buttons, infinite scrolling and pagination, including for both mobile and desktop. He’ll see how search results need to be implemented differently from category navigation, along with several pitfalls with implementation and examples from leading e-commerce websites.
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So far, most of the responsive design thinking has revolved around covering the range of experiences from mobile to desktop. Yet little attention has been paid to the opportunities for expanding that range beyond the standard desktop screen, to create an experience optimized for modern large-scale displays. In this article, Christian Holst will explore how e-commerce designers could use responsive upscaling to craft a tailored experience for users with big screens. He’ll cover one core principle, along with 11 ideas for upscaling different parts of the e-commerce experience to deal with the various usability challenges observed during our e-commerce usability studies.
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Given the importance of filtering, Christian Holst and the entire team at the Baymard Institute spent the nine months researching how users browse, filter and evaluate products in e-commerce product lists. At the core of this research was a large-scale usability study testing 19 leading e-commerce websites with real end users, following the think-aloud protocol. In this article Christian will take a closer look at some of the research findings related to the users’ filtering experience. He’ll walk through each of some filtering insights, showing you the usability test findings, examining the benchmark data and presenting best practice examples for creating a good e-commerce filtering experience.
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On-site search is a key component of almost any e-commerce website. But unfortunately, search often doesn’t work very well. That’s why Baymard Institute has invested months conducting a large-scale usability study, testing the e-commerce search experience of 19 major e-commerce websites with real-world end users. In this article, Christian Holst will provide you insight on how to improve the search experience and success rate on your e-commerce website. He’ll round the article off with a general analysis of the current state of e-commerce search.
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If customers can’t find a product, they can’t buy it. Therefore we invested eight months conducting a large-scale usability research study on the product-finding experience. We set out to explore how users navigate, find and select products on e-commerce websites. Throughout the test sessions, the subjects would abandon websites because they were unable to find the products they were looking for. All of these usability issues have been distilled into 79 concise guidelines in a report titled “Homepage & Category Usability.” In this article, we’ll go over seven of the guidelines.
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Clearly, a good mobile experience requires good form usability, and implementing touch keyboards is a key part of that. During a recent study of 18 of the largest mobile commerce websites, we observed how certain features and limitations of modern touch keyboards can collide with the user’s expectations of how to fill out a form. When this happens, users quickly grow frustrated, Today, Christian Holst will look deeper into the usability issues surrounding touch keyboards, including five design guidelines that will alleviate some of these pains.
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We decided to conduct a large-scale usability study focusing specifically on m-commerce, and our subjects encountered 1,000+ usability-related issues during the testing sessions. These usability issues have been analyzed and distilled into a report titled “M-Commerce Usability.” In this article, we’ll share 10 recommendations from that report with you.
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You send in questions you have about UX Design, and each month we’ll pick a handful of questions asked by our readers about best practices in designing smart and usable experiences.
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In which kinds of sites/projects is it better to use an adaptive layout (fixed break points)? Find some popular questions asked by our readers (and answered by Christian Holst) around good practices in designing smart and usable experiences.
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Christian Holst goes over some interesting stats he found when benchmarking the top 100 grossing e-commerce websites’ checkout processes. In this post, Holst explains each of them and shows you some real life implementations of do’s and don’ts when it comes to checkout processes.
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Error pages for form-field validation are dreadful. You’ve just filled out 20 form fields, yet you get the same bloated page thrown back in your face because a single field failed to validate. I clearly recall the often loud sighs of despair during our last usability study each time a test subject encountered a validation error page.
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The country selector. It’s there when you create an account for a new Web service, check out of an e-commerce store or sign up for a conference. The normal design? A drop-down list with all of the available countries.
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Why do customers abandon their shopping cart so often? Based on a 2010 study of web users testing 15 e-commerce websites, in this article, Christian Holst shares 11 fundamental guidelines from that report.
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