Summary

Business-to-business websites face usability challenges far beyond those of regular B2C sites. The products are more complex (in fact, they are often services), the customers are more diverse, and the buying process has many more steps and complications.

This report contains 144 guidelines for improving the design of B2B websites, and is richly illustrated with 158 color screenshots from many different websites, showing usability problems we found in our testing as well as examples of highly-usable sites.

This report shows what happens when real business customers and purchasers try to use the information on a B2B site to research their options, build their shortlist, sign up for further information, and complete the purchase (on those sites that offered e-commerce capabilities).

The design guidelines in this report are based on extensive user research, showing you what actually worked for real users when they were looking to buy for their companies:

• We ran one-on-one user tests with business customers from a wide range of small and large companies as they used 179 B2B websites from many different industry segments.
• We conducted 12 focus groups.
• We went on seven contextual field visits.

> Sample chapter as thumbnail pages.

Table of Contents

282-page report.

1. Executive Summary
   • User Research
   • B2B vs. B2C
   • “Add to Cart” vs. Supporting the Full Buying Process
   • User-Hostile Design
2. Research Overview
   • Procedure
   • Websites Studied
3. Introduction
4. Personas: Putting Faces to Your Users
   • What are Personas?
   • Personas: User Types
     • Sam the Small-Biz Saver
     • Ashley the Office Admin
     • Erin the Enterprise Employee
     • Barbara the Boss
     • Pat the Professional Purchaser
   • Big Business Versus Small Business Differences
5. Success & Satisfaction Ratings of B2B Sites
   • Success Ratings
   • Satisfaction Ratings
   • Correlation Between Success and Satisfaction
   • Customer Priorities: Information Rankings
   • How Company Reputation Affects Ratings and Web Behavior
   • Designing for the Purchase Process
     • Purchasing Phases
6. B2B Usability Guidelines Summary
7. Guidelines: Phase 1, Research
   • Company Presence on the Web
   • Making It Easy for Prospects to Find You
   • Creating Good First Impressions
   • Helping People Choose the Right Product
   • Page Layout
   • Category Names and Navigational Structure
   • Search
   • Product Pages
   • Pricing Information
   • Getting Rates on Fedex.com
   • Product Images
   • Multimedia and Demonstration Videos
   • Designing Online Information for Offline Use
8. Guidelines: Phase 2, Relationship
   • Make Your Content Shine
   • Contact Information
   • Live Chat
     • User Initiated Chat
     • Uninitiated Chat
   • Registration and Online Account Management
   • Enhancing Credibility
   • Case Studies
   • White Papers & Technical Documents
   • Corporate Information
   • Tone & Writing Style
9. Guidelines: Phase 3, Decide
   • Comparison Tables
   • Presentation Materials
10. Guidelines: Phase 4, Buy
    • Call to Action
    • Shopping Cart and Checkout
    • Special Sectors
11. Guidelines: Phase 5, Support/Maintain
    • Supporting and Maintaining Customers
    • Partner-Specific Custom WebSites
12. Guidelines: Phase 6, Replace
    • Repair and Replace
    • Retaining Salience
    • The Online Impact of Offline Marketing Dollars
13. Methodology
    • Overview
    • Matrix for the Focus Group Sessions
    • The Participants
    • Tasks
    • Websites Tested

What You Get

• Checklist of 144 specific design recommendations: review your website for these 144 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 business users behave when using a wide variety of B2B sites, including extensive quotes (often colorful, because they were often annoyed). Learn from the users' comments and reactions to common design mistakes in the B2B sites we tested.
• 158 screenshots of B2B pages with descriptions of why they worked well for users or caused them problems in usability testing.
• $190,000 of user research at 0.1% of the cost.
• Test methodology description, allowing you to run your own user tests of your own design.

Who Should Read This Report?

• Anybody who is responsible for the design or content of a business-to-business website, whether it's e-commerce enabled or purely generating leads for offline sales channels.
• Executives in charge of communications strategy for companies that sell to other businesses

Running a similar usability study yourself to collect comparative design lessons from a large number of websites would cost more than $190,000 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.

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