What Consumers See

Baymard's UX research in e-commerce.

The Baymard Institute devoted itself for decades to observation. How do people shop online? Where do they drop off? What frustrates them? They recorded hours of screen recordings of actual behavior. Not what people said they did. What they actually did.

One of their findings was so simple it could be shameful. Most online shopping experiences are designed by people who never truly watched how customers behave. They sat in meetings and said things like: "We can add a field here." No one checked: does this actually cause anyone pain?

I see this reflected in the DIP concept. Inclusive production requires observation. Not assumptions. Not what you think is logical. What the human actually does, where the human actually hits a wall.

Baymard discovered, for example, that many stores have forced account creation. You must create an account before you pay. This feels logical in the conference room: then you have an email address. But Baymard saw that 70 percent of people would drop off at this point. They want to pay now, not create an account for later.

These two processes, account creation and payment, were designed separately. By people who didn't look at each other. By people who didn't look at the customer.

The irony is that inclusive design doesn't have to be more complicated. It doesn't have to cost more. You only need to look at actual behavior and flow with it, not against it.

That's what Baymard taught: design is not what you intend. Design is what actually happens. Until you make that distinction, you're not designing. You're improvising.

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Source: Baymard Institute, UX Research (2015-2024)