Summary

IR is a natural for the Web. Companies can provide many types of IR services as self-service -- at hugely reduced costs -- as long as the user interface is sufficiently easy.

Investors, both individual and professional, want more than just the data that independent services can provide. They want the company's own story and investment vision. What they don't want is to wade through complex or irrelevant information. Balancing all this is the challenge for the IR user experience: You must provide both simplicity and vision, connect with investors without antagonizing them, and serve both professionals and people with little financial knowledge. To achieve this balance, your design must focus on users' needs.

The report contains 65 guidelines for improving the design of IR areas of corporate websites, and is richly illustrated with 95 color screenshots from many different websites, showing usability problems we found in our testing as well as examples of highly-usable IR pages.

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

This report shows what happens when real investors try to use IR pages.

We observed users as they performed investment-oriented tasks on 20 company websites, selected to cover a range of industries and countries: Allied Domecq (UK), Biogen, Ceridian, Home Depot, InFocus, Interpublic Group, Johnson & Johnson, Labor Ready, Novo Nordisk (Denmark), Pacific Sunwear of California, Palm, Pfeiffer Vacuum Technology (Germany), Rowan Companies, Royal Bank of Scotland (UK), Stora Enso (Finland), Symantec, Starbucks, Tyson Foods, UPS, and Vodafone (UK).

Testing was conducted in four cities in the U.S. and the U.K.: New York, Boston, San Diego, and London. We chose these cities because they include both main centers of the investment business and more mainstream locations.

Table of Contents

1. Executive Summary
2. Research Overview
   • Procedure
   • Designs Studied
3. Success Rates and Satisfaction Ratings
   • Average Success Rates
   • Average Satisfaction Ratings
4. What Different Audiences Need from Company Websites
   • Individual Investors
   • Financial Analysts
   • Professional Investors
   • Financial Journalists
   • How People Get to the Website
5. Prioritizing Financial Information on Your Website
6. Guidelines for Designing the IR Area of Your Website
7. Discussion and Examples for Design Guidelines
   • Homepage: 2 design guidelines
   • Company Information: 4 design guidelines
   • Stock Information: 5 design guidelines
   • Charts: 11 design guidelines
   • Company Financials: 7 design guidelines
   • HTML and PDF Formats for Annual Reports and Other Reports: 5 design guidelines
   • Financial Calendar: 3 design guidelines
   • Email Alerts: 3 design guidelines (see also separate report on email newsletters)
   • Slide Presentations: 3 design guidelines
   • Webcasts and Audio Archives: 3 design guidelines
   • IR Contact: 3 design guidelines
   • Registration and Forms: 2 design guidelines
   • Printing: 2 design guidelines
   • Navigation: 6 design guidelines
   • International Considerations: 4 design guidelines
   • Company Presence on the Web: 2 design guidelines
8. Methodology
   • Participants
   • Task Order
   • Open-Ended Tasks
   • Directed Tasks

Test Participants

• individual investors
• institutional investors who make decisions for mutual funds or other companies that invest large sums
• financial analysts and advisors who recommend investments to others
• journalists who write about finance for business publications or major newspapers

What You Get

• Checklist of 65 specific design recommendations: review your website and its IR section for these 65 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 investors, analysts, and business reporters behave when using a wide variety of IR sites, including extensive quotes (often colorful, because they were often annoyed). Learn from the users' comments and reactions to common design mistakes in the IR sections we tested.
• 95 screenshots of IR pages with descriptions of why they worked well for investors or caused them problems in usability testing.
• Recommended information architecture for IR pages, at three levels: for a low, medium, and high investment in online IR. Deriving a rough IA to serve as the starting point for your own design usually costs a hundred times the price of this report.
• $200,000 of user research with investors and analysts at 0.1% of the cost.
• Test methodology description, allowing you to run your own user tests of your own design.
• Knowledge to make your IR information easier for business journalists to use; thus getting more press coverage. The business value of better PR depends on the company, but is usually substantially higher than the cost of this low-priced report.

Who Should Read This Report?

• Anybody who is responsible for the design or content of Investor Relations online
• IR professionals wishing to advise their clients on proper use of the Web
• 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 around the world would cost more than $200,000 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) $248 for the PDF file (121 pages) $468 for site license to make copies