Skip to content
English - United States
Contact us
  • There are no suggestions because the search field is empty.

What are Guidelines?

lorem ipsum

Elements of a guideline

Each Baymard guideline is rooted in issues experienced by users in our large-scale qualitative studies. Guideline pages are structured to help you quickly understand the issue, learn how to act on it, and see real-life examples. 

A typical guideline includes:

  • Guideline labels: Labels indicate the severity of the UX issue, what platforms it applies to, characteristics such as Low Cost or Missed Opportunity, and specific goals it can help sites accomplish, such as Lower Bound and Exit Rate.
  • Summary: A short explanation of the core issue, its impact on the user and site, and advice about how to fix it.
  • Research findings: The core of the guideline, outlining the UX issue and recommended solution.
  • Quiz: A question from Baymard’s training platform that lets you check your understanding of the issue.
  • Review tool: An interactive tool that walks you through how to assess the guideline on your own site.
  • Implementation examples: Screenshots from real sites that follow or violate the guideline.
  • Benchmark performances: A year-on-year visualization of how major sites perform on the guideline, based on Baymard’s manual rating of those sites.
  • Accessibility requirements: Brief summary of accessibility considerations when implementing the guideline.

Finding relevant guidelines

There are multiple ways to surface guidelines that match your current task:

  • Use UX-Query: Ask a specific design question and get relevant guidelines as part of the response.
  • Use UX-Ray: Run a scan to automatically surface guidelines tied to specific issues on your site.
  • Browse by page type: Navigate the guideline catalog based on common page types such as product list, product page, and checkout.
  • Browse by platform or industry: View guidelines associated with your site’s industry or guidelines that are specific to desktop, mobile, or app platforms.
  • Browse by topic: View guidelines associated with more specific site areas or UX topics, such as Account Sign-Up Forms, Cross-Sells, In-Store Pickup, or Shopify-specific recommendations.
  • Browse by business objective: View guidelines associated with specific business goals such as Increase Average Order Value or Decrease Cart Abandonment.
  • Search the catalog: Use keywords related to your page or UX issue in the guideline search.
  • Explore from examples: Start with a page design or implementation example and jump to the related guideline.

This layered access ensures you can find useful guidance whether you're reviewing an existing site, exploring redesign options, or solving a specific UX problem.

Applying guidelines to your site

To get the most from your Baymard access, you can:

  1. Browse guidelines by page type, industry, or business objective.
  2. Review relevant UX issues and compare with your current implementation.
  3. Explore benchmarks to understand the status quo for your industry and surface opportunities to differentiate yourself.
  4. Consider the observed severity and frequency of the UX issues. For higher-impact or higher-resource changes, use guidelines to frame a testable hypothesis and conduct your own testing.
  5. Decide what changes to implement.
  6. Explore implementation examples for design inspiration.

Use your business goals, site context, and available data to prioritize which changes to explore first. Baymard’s research is meant to serve as evidence-backed heuristics, not a rulebook. We recommend validating high-impact changes with testing.