Mobile UX: Avoid Using Subpages within the Product Details Page (26% Don’t)
Research Topic
How do you design a user-friendly shopping experience for a 4-inch screen?
Mobile traffic has soared in recent years and now constitute 30-50% of all traffic on many e-commerce sites. However, it’s not uncommon for mobile e-commerce sites to have a significantly poorer conversion rate than their desktop counterpart – in some cases converting less than half as many visitors into customers.
This mobile usability study examines how the touch interface, the small screen, and user’s mobile behavior introduce a whole host of pitfalls to watch out for when designing and running a mobile e-commerce site.
Despite testing the mobile sites of some of the largest e-commerce players in the world, the test subjects encountered a staggering 1,000+ usability-related issues during the test sessions. These usability issues have been analyzed and distilled into 144 design guidelines on how to best design and structure a high-performing mobile e-commerce site, as well as documenting how end-users perceive and interact with mobile sites in a shopping context.
This page provides you an overview of our research specific to Mobile E-commerce UX. All of this research is available as part of Baymard Premium.
Based on the findings from the qualitative usability research study we’ve also benchmarked the full mobile user experience of 50 major US e-commerce sites. This comprehensive benchmark database with 678 mobile page types manually reviewed and annotated, provides you with 2,100+ categorized mobile screenshots and 3,600+ implementation examples of the 144 mobile e-commerce usability guideline.
The UX benchmark of the 50 major mobile e-commerce sites provides a clear picture of the general state of mobile e-commerce performance, and identifies common design flaws as well as strategic oversights and opportunities.
Mobile E-Commerce
205 Guidelines
Mobile Homepage
8 Guidelines
Main Navigation & Categories
21 Guidelines
Main Navigation
6 Guidelines
Category Taxonomy
10 Guidelines
Category Pages
5 Guidelines
Mobile On-Site Search
23 Guidelines
Autocomplete
7 Guidelines
Query Types
8 Guidelines
Design & Logic
8 Guidelines
Product List
43 Guidelines
Mobile Product List Layout & Features
18 Guidelines
Mobile Filtering
7 Guidelines
Mobile List Item Content
18 Guidelines
Mobile Product Pages
19 Guidelines
Mobile Checkout
47 Guidelines
Layout & Features
2 Guidelines
Shopping Cart
4 Guidelines
Account Selection & Creation
7 Guidelines
User Info
7 Guidelines
Shipping & Store Pickup
6 Guidelines
Payment
12 Guidelines
Order Review & Confirmation
9 Guidelines
Mobile Forms
25 Guidelines
Form Fields
10 Guidelines
Field Validation
8 Guidelines
Input Optimization
7 Guidelines
Mobile Site-Wide Features & Elements
19 Guidelines
When looking closer at the average site’s mobile usability performance, we see a generally poor state of affairs. Notice how around half of all sites are performing downright poorly within all four themes, constituting a mobile shopping experience where users have great difficulties in finding, evaluating, and purchasing products – if able to at all. This observation aligns well with IBM’s report on mobile versus desktop e-commerce, documenting the average desktop conversion rate to be approximately twice as high as the mobile site conversion rate.
Mobile Product Descriptions, Specs, & Images is the only area where a high number of sites perform good. For the topics of Homepage Navigation & Search, Product Page Layout, Cart, Checkout Information, and Form Field Usability, only relatively few sites can be considered “decent”. “Decent” here corresponds to an experience where most users are able to complete the purchase, but the experience and process towards that purchase is filled with detours, misunderstandings, and various annoyances.
Some of the overall poor and mediocre performance is simply due to mobile and touch platforms still being relatively new territory – compared to the two decades old desktop website. With most e-commerce sites still being somewhat in the “exploration stages” of mobile UX – as in; it is still being determined what mobile design patterns consistently works well and what doesn’t. Furthermore, we’ve also observed several mobile patterns being highly popular with designers and developers but completely breaking user behavior and expectations. It’s not just a new platform; there’s a lot of malpractice being popularized.
Lastly, and most importantly, the mobile platform is truly difficult to design for – the lack of screen real estate causes a dramatic loss of page overview for users. As a result, most of the best-performing solutions and patterns, including those identified in this study, are, in the end, still a compromise. They are the best attainable results given the severe limitations of the mobile platform.
Explore the current mobile UX performance in our:
FREE RESEARCH CONTENT
Explore design patterns across 678 page examples of mobile designs and features from leading e-commerce sites, all annotated and organized into 17 different page types. This is a great way to get inspiration for your own mobile design, and to get a feel for emerging trends in Mobile e-commerce .
FREE RESEARCH CONTENT
We’ve released a small subset of the Premium research finding on Mobile UX for free in these articles:
PAID RESEARCH CONTENT
All 134 checkout research findings are available as part of Baymard Premium, and are divided into the following 17 topics (611 pages of research findings in total):
Get full access to all our Mobile E-Commerce UX research reports, mobile benchmarks, and page designs previewed here, along with our complete 700+ guidelines for Homepage & Category Navigation, Search, Product Listing, Product Details Page, Checkout, and Accounts & Self-Service. Utilize our 54,000+ hours of UX research to improve your mobile user experience and to document your UX decisions.
This research on Mobile UX is part of Baymard Institute’s full 54,000+ hours of large scale research catalog, which is based on:
Baymard’s research methodology is described in detail here.
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