Baymard Institute
Independent UX research institute focused on e-commerce usability. Baymard runs large-scale, qualitative usability studies and maintains a benchmark database of e-commerce sites, turning observed user behavior into concrete, prioritized design guidelines. Much of its published research targets on-site search and discovery — query types, autocomplete, faceted navigation, search scopes, no-results pages, and search-results presentation.
Its house style is the quantified guideline — “N% of sites get this wrong” — derived from testing real shoppers against real interfaces rather than opinion or vendor benchmarks. This makes Baymard one of the most-cited empirical sources for Search UX decisions.
Key Research in this Vault
- Ecommerce Search UX - 8 Query Types — Baymard’s 8-type taxonomy of e-commerce search queries
- 13 Design Patterns for Autocomplete Suggestions — autocomplete UX patterns (27% get it wrong)
Topics They Inform
- Faceted navigation & filtering (Faceted Search)
- Search scopes (Search Scopes)
- No-results recovery (Zero Results)
- Results presentation and search-field design
Related
- Search UX Research — the category of independent search-UX research orgs
- Search UX — the design discipline Baymard’s findings feed
- Nielsen Norman Group — the other major search-UX research organization