
The Baymard Institute: An evidence-based trove of UX best practices - sndxr
https://medium.com/@seandexter1/the-baymard-institute-a-glorious-evidence-based-trove-of-ux-best-practices-189d839b1176
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ssharp
I do conversion rate optimization for ecommerce and Baymard is an
extraordinarily valuable resource. If you're doing any work in ecomm or b2c,
it's well worth the premium subscription price.

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.

~~~
futhey
At one point I also specialized in conversion-rate optimization for some very
large eCommerce sites. If you can easily afford these, take advantage of them.
There is no clearer guide for how to take a large eCommerce site from mediocre
to being well-optimized for conversion.

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enhdless
Thanks for sharing!

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/](https://ux.stackexchange.com/)) for informing
decisions on UI/UX design details; the answers usually provide clear
justification and diagrams describing possible solutions.

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wgx
Shameless plug: I’ve been a “technical” UX person for my whole career, and a
big fan of (and trained by) the Nielsen Norman Group, mentioned elsewhere in
this thread. I’ve always enjoyed this “principles” approach to UX design and
wrote “101 UX Principles” in 2018: [https://uxbook.io](https://uxbook.io) \-
please do check it out, it’s ideal for non-UX specialists to understand the
usability reasons behind common design decisions (and mistakes to avoid). Plug
over!

~~~
seangp
Surprised to see all your text content is centre-aligned on mobile. Surely
that’s not a UX best-practice as it degrades the “readability” of the content?

~~~
wgx
I don't think it matters for short sentences / bullet points. I'd agree for
paragraphs, however.

~~~
jooize
I found the centering making it more difficult to read. I also cannot overview
the lists as well. Centering requires the reader to retarget their eyes at a
different place every line.

In the praise section, I was confused about which text belonged to which
person.

The page scrolls horizontally in iOS 13.x Safari.

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ehutch79
I really wish someone would publish this with larger examples. Checkouts are
great, but some of us are working on larger systems with 25+ fields and most
of that required, or dependantly required, and no, wizards apparently just
confuse our users.

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joegahona
I saw this on Reddit several hours ago. Good to see it shared here too. I
looked at only a few articles and loved every word.

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/](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/remote-control-anarchy/)

~~~
incangold
Still the most useful article on UX I’ve ever read, 26 years later:
[https://www.nngroup.com/articles/goal-
composition/](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/goal-composition/)

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eatonphil
I hadn't heard of this one. Nielsen Norman [0] is another research institute
for UX I've found very valuable. Much (or all?) of NN's research is freely
available.

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

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kristiankh
Hi Sean, thank you very much for this article.

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

~~~
igorkraw
Hi,

are there plans to add an option for individuals/academics like myself who
would like to learn about design and UX and possibly doing our own studies
based on your data?

Cheers, Igor

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hizxy
You’d be surprised how many internal product teams are not evidence-based.

~~~
pembrook
Not at all, I'd say _most_ of them aren't.

What I found surprising, is how many executive teams at Fortune 500 companies
were also not evidence-based.

When making decisions with hundreds of millions of dollars, many executives
I've seen still just do what "feels good" to them.

~~~
hizxy
Sad state of affairs.

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carapace
[https://baymard.com/](https://baymard.com/)

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cousin_it
At first I was skeptical, but this is great stuff. For example
[https://baymard.com/blog/autocomplete-
design](https://baymard.com/blog/autocomplete-design) gives 13 subtle ways to
make autocomplete better, and I agree with all of them.

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indysigners
I know the folks at Baymard for quite a bit and love what they are doing. They
aggregate years of research into their resources and for nearly every possible
variation in the e-commerce world, they already have found an answer.

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Dramatize
They were a great resource when doing some e-commerce projects (after being
out of practice for a few years).

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omniscient_oce
This article is paywalled it seems. Any tl;dr? Or should I just check out
their actual website

~~~
bryanrasmussen
The tl;dr is that the Baymard institute publishes something on Medium limiting
its distribution, the UX for finding out what the institute has to say (if you
cannot read the article) is - read some blurb on Medium, search for name of
institute to find website, go to website and decide if what they have to say
is useful for you - or in the case where you go through HN or some other
commentary on the article reading the comments first before searching for
site.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
I guess I'm just getting more and more annoyed at Medium posts, being stupid
enough to click the link and seeing that it wants me to sign up.

~~~
omniscient_oce
Yeah same. The content on there is a mixed bag, they occasionally have stuff
worth reading but there's also a lot of junk. Incognito mode doesn't seem to
work for me anymore if I do feel the urge to see what it says. I guess if I
delete my cookies it would work but then it's just too much of a hassle. The
baymard site seems pretty interesting though.

