Summary

Representing a company or organization on the Internet is one of a website's most important jobs. Explaining the company's purpose and what it stands for provides essential support for any of the site's other goals. Unfortunately, most websites do a poor job on this explanation.

The report contains 70 guidelines for improving the design of "about us" areas of corporate websites, and is richly illustrated with 209 color screenshots from many different websites, showing usability problems we found in our testing as well as examples of highly-usable "about us" pages.

> sample chapter as thumbnail pages
> Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox summarizing the report

This report shows what happens when real users try to use the information an organization presents about itself on its website.

We observed users as they performed both exploratory and directed tasks on 63 websites, selected to cover a range of organizations, including large, medium-sized, and small companies as well as non-profit organizations and government agencies.

Table of Contents

1. Executive Summary
   • User research: Two rounds
   • Trends in About Us usability
   • Overviews: Providing key context
   • Good/bad examples
   • Why explain yourself?
   • Connecting to users
2. Research Overview
   • The procedure
   • The participants
   • Websites studied
3. Success Rates and Satisfaction Ratings
4. Weaker Brands Must Work Harder
   • Well–Known
   • Lesser–Known
5. Guidelines Summary
6. Guidelines Discussion
   • First Impressions: the First 30 Seconds
   • Company Information
   • History and Timelines
   • Business Philosophy
   • Executive Members
   • Social Responsibility
   • Awards and Recognition
   • Contact Information
   • Customer Service
   • NonProfit and Charitable Organizations
   • Graphics and Multimedia
   • Usability Basics
7. Methodology
   • Overview
   • Participants
   • Task Procedure
   • Open-ended Tasks
   • Directed Tasks
   • Websites

What You Get

• Checklist of 70 specific design recommendations: review your website and its "about us" section for these 70 items, and you will discover several things that need improvement.
  • The average website typically violates about half of our usability guidelines. You might have the one perfect site in the world that does everything right, but the odds are against you. It is safest to score your design against a checklist of usability guidelines to make sure you don't do anything wrong.
• Description of how users behave when using a wide variety of corporate sites, including extensive quotes (often colorful, because they were often annoyed). Learn from the users' comments and reactions to common design mistakes in the "about us" sections we tested.
• 209 screenshots of organizational info pages with descriptions of why they worked well for users or caused them problems in usability testing.
• $120,000 of user research at 0.1% of the cost.
• Test methodology description, allowing you to run your own user tests of your own design.

Comparing the Editions

If you already own the 1st edition of this report, should you buy the 2nd edition? Probably not, because the guidelines in the first edition were confirmed in Study Two (though some were refined in the new edition).

The 2nd edition does have substantial new information about the use of video on "about us" pages, so do get the new edition if you're planning to add multimedia features.

Comparison of the editions:

Who Should Read This Report?

• Anybody who is responsible for the design or content of an organization's website.
• Executives in charge of communications strategy for a major corporate website

Running a similar usability study yourself to collect comparative design lessons from a large number of websites would cost more than $120,000 and several months of an experienced usability professional's time.

Please help us continue publish low-price reports by buying a site license if you have colleagues who will read the report. If you only need it for yourself, then that's obviously what the single-user license is for. If somebody "gives" you a copy, then please buy a download anyway to keep prices down in the future.

Download Report (from eSellerate) $124 for the PDF file (253 pages) $248 for site license to make copies