The Baymard Institute: An evidence-based trove of UX best practices

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.

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.

Someone else mentioned Nielsen Norman -- I'm a huge fan of that too. Jakob Nielsen's rant against remote controls is a fun read:https://www.nngroup.com/articles/remote-control-anarchy/

[0] https://www.nngroup.com/

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.

Thanks