Summary

• Why journalists leave or are tempted to leave the PR sections of all the sites we tested
• How to provide the exact information journalists are looking for, in a format which make them use it
• Design flaws which are most likely to upset journalists
• How to support international press inquiries

The report contains 75 guidelines for improving the design of PR areas of corporate websites, and is richly illustrated with 149 color screenshots from many different websites, showing usability problems we found in our testing as well as examples of highly-usable press areas. Also examples from many other websites which the test users mentioned as particularly good or bad based on their experience as journalists.

See sample page
See sample chapter as thumbnail pages

The findings are based on usability testing of 18 corporate websites with 32 journalists (23 in the United States and 9 in Europe). The sites included:

• Six big American corporations (Fidelity Investments, Merck, Philip Morris, Qwest Communications, Tyco, Wal-Mart)
• Six multi-national corporations based in Europe (Benetton, BMW, Deutsche Bank, GlaxoSmithKline, Nokia, Vivendi Universal)
• One small company (Hemscott)
• Three high-tech start-ups (Pace Micro Technologies, SeeItFirst, Tellme)
• Two government sites (United States Patent Office, State of Maine)

While all sites had some good traits, such as interesting content or some good interface designs, every site also had significant usability problems. At some point in every single test session, journalists said that they would have to leave the site because it failed to deliver what they needed. On average, users were only able to complete 70% of simple test tasks such as finding financial info about a company or finding the telephone number of a PR representative.

After having a difficult time on a site, one journalist said, "I would be reluctant to go back to the site. If I had a choice to write about something else, then I would write about something else." Another journalist described what he'd do when he could not find any of the facts he needed for his story: "Better not to write it than to get it wrong. I might avoid the subject altogether."  

Table of Contents

218 page report.

1. Executive Summary
   • Journalists' Information Needs
   • Success Rate: 70%
   • International Usability
   • Design Guidelines
   • Study Overview
   • About the Second Edition
2. Current State Of Affairs
   • Differences Between Findings Over the Years
   • Site Design Can Impact Press Coverage
   • What Journalists Look For
   • User Success
   • Users' Ratings of the Websites
   • Correlation Between Success and User Ratings
   • Even Short Visits to Your Site Can Impact Users' Perception
3. Design Guidelines
4. Your Organization's Presence on the Web
5. Press Contact Information
6. Press Information, Releases, and News
7. Scorecard, and How the Sites in the Study Organize Press Releases
8. Information about the Organization, Products, and Services
9. Information about Management
10. Financial Information
11. Philanthropy and Social Responsibility
12. Organization and Style of the Site and Pages on the Site
13. Site Content, Writing Style, and Facts
14. UI Design Elements (Including Search)
15. Graphics, Multimedia, PDF Files, and Performance
16. Dealing With a Corporate Crisis
17. The Website and the Rest of the Organization
18. Tips for Emailing Press Releases to Journalists
19. When and Why Journalists Leave Sites
20. Good Sites: Journalists Gave These Thumbs Up
21. Poor Sites: Journalists Gave These Thumbs Down
22. About the Sites Studied
23. About Participants
    • Background
    • Topics They Write About
    • Nature of Publications Participants Write For
24. Methodology
    • Site Usage
    • Session Location
    • Test Tasks and Discussion
    • About Using This Methodology

Test Participants

• Monthly international entertainment magazine with 2 million readers
• Monthly national print magazine with more than 2 million subscribers
• Daily national newspaper with 1.5 million readers
• Daily global newspaper with 500,000 subscribers
• Bi-weekly international magazine with more than 500,000 subscribers
• Monthly national print and Web magazine with 500,000 subscribers
• Daily national newsmagazine with Web and print editions and more than 500,000 subscribers
• Monthly print magazine with more than 500,000 subscribers
• Daily national newspaper with more than 450,000 readers
• Monthly news magazine with print and Web editions and 300,000 subscribers
• Monthly print magazine with 100,000 subscribers
• Bi-monthly print magazine with 100,000 subscribers
• Weekly print and Web magazine with 40,000 readers
• Weekly Web-based computer magazine with more than 35,000 subscribers
• Monthly national news magazine with print and Web editions and 14,000 subscribers
• Monthly national entertainment magazine with print and Web editions
• Small news website, owned by a large national newspaper
• Small national newspaper owned by a very large national newspaper
• Daily Web magazine
• Radio news show with 1 million listeners
• Various other large and small print and Web-based magazines and newspapers

Comparing the First and Second Editions

If you already own the first edition of this report, should you buy the second edition?

To be honest, we can only recommend this if Web-based PR is one of your main job functions. For people who are less heavily engaged in designing online PR, there is no reason to spend time and money on the second edition if you have the first edition. The most important guidelines are included in the first edition and none of the findings in the first edition were invalidated in the second study.

Here's a short comparison of the first and second editions:

• Guidelines: increased from 32 to 75
• Page count: increased from 114 to 217
• Screenshots: increased from 62 to 149
• Sites tested: increased from 10 to 18

> Read Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox about the second edition

What You Get

• Checklist of 75 specific design recommendations: review your website and its press room for these 75 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 journalists behave when using a wide variety of PR sites, including extensive quotes (often colorful, because they were frequently annoyed). Learn from the users' comments and reactions to common design mistakes in the PR sections we tested.
• 149 screenshots of PR pages with descriptions of why they worked well for journalists or caused them problems in usability testing.
• $150,000 of user research with journalists at 0.2% of the cost; find out how real journalists behave when they use real websites.
• Test methodology description, allowing you to run your own user tests of your own design.
• Knowledge to make your site easier for 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. Consider how much money you spend on PR to pitch your company: isn't it worth spending a tiny fraction of this amount to ensure that journalists are treated well if they decide to follow up and visit your site?

Who Should Read This Report?

• Anybody who is responsible for the design or content of the PR area of a website
• PR 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 $150,000 and several months of an experienced usability professional's time.

Please help us continue publishing 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 (217 pages) $468 for site license to make copies