Corporate Websites Get a 'D' in PR; Nielsen Norman Group Releases Report and Design Guidelines from Usability Study with Journalists.

Business Editors

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 20, 2001

Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen today released findings from a study of corporate websites that warn of the negative impact poorly designed sites can have on press relations. The Nielsen Norman Group usability study found that on average, journalists visiting corporate websites could get answers to basic questions only 60% of the time. In some cases, the site designs impeded journalists' efforts and drove them away in frustration. The report sets forth 32 design guidelines to prevent this from happening. Entitled "Designing Websites to Maximize Press Relations," and co-authored by Nielsen and Kara Pernice Coyne, the 114-page report is available to download for $250 from the Nielsen Norman Group website at http:///www.nngroup.com/reports/pr.

"Journalists don't have time to wade through complex navigation trees to sift factual wheat from marketing chaff," said Nielsen in his keynote address today at the Buzz 2001 Conference. "Companies that want accurate media coverage should design their websites with journalists' needs in mind, specifically their need for fast access to facts and figures as well as a simple way to contact a live person in the PR department. Common-sense steps that are rarely taken."

Twenty journalists in New York and Copenhagen were each given specific tasks to perform on one of 10 corporate Websites while Nielsen Norman Group senior user-experience specialist Kara Coyne observed their efforts and recorded their comments. The sites represented big and small companies based in the United States or Europe: BMW; Fidelity Investments; Merck; Nokia; Philip Morris; SeeItFirst; Tellme; United Colors of Benetton; United States Patent Office; Wal-Mart.

Study findings include:

-- Journalists were unable to complete the task given them 40% of the time,
resulting in a 60% success rate;

-- In the task journalists deemed most important (finding a PR contact and
phone number), they were least successful, unable to find the desired
information 45% of the time;

-- Poor usability for domestic users meant miserable usability for overseas
users (e.g. use of different date formats in the US and Europe);

-- The top five reasons journalists gave for visiting a company's website were:
1) to find a PR contact; 2) check basic facts about the company; 3) discover
the company's own position on events; 4) check financial information; 5)
download images to use as illustrations in stories;

-- When poor site-design impeded the efforts of journalists to complete
specified tasks, it sometimes impacted their impressions of a website and their
opinion of the company.

Nielsen Norman Group (http://www.nngroup.com) is a user-experience think tank and consulting firm that advises companies about how to enter the age of the customer and achieve success through human-centered design of products and services. The three principals of Nielsen Norman Group -- Jakob Nielsen, Don Norman and Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini-- are each world-renowned experts in usability and user interface design. Besides authoring books and evangelizing to large audiences about user experience, they and the other user-experience specialists in the Nielsen Norman Group conduct high-level usability reviews of websites, Internet services, consumer products, software designs and anything else that needs to be easy-to-use. Nielsen Norman Group is headquartered in Silicon Valley, California.