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217 pages PDF format
Download your copy of the report instantly (from eSellerate)
$248 for a single report, $468 for the report and the right to make copies within your organization. (No shipping/handling fees will be added: it's an immediate download directly from the server.)
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Summary
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The report describes:
- 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."
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Table of Contents
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218 page report.
- Executive Summary
- Journalists' Information Needs
- Success Rate: 70%
- International Usability
- Design Guidelines
- Study Overview
- About the Second Edition
- 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
- Design Guidelines
- Your Organization's Presence on the Web
- Press Contact Information
- Press Information, Releases, and News
- Scorecard, and How the Sites in the Study Organize Press Releases
- Information about the Organization, Products, and Services
- Information about Management
- Financial Information
- Philanthropy and Social Responsibility
- Organization and Style of the Site and Pages on the Site
- Site Content, Writing Style, and Facts
- UI Design Elements (Including Search)
- Graphics, Multimedia, PDF Files, and Performance
- Dealing With a Corporate Crisis
- The Website and the Rest of the Organization
- Tips for Emailing Press Releases to Journalists
- When and Why Journalists Leave Sites
- Good Sites: Journalists Gave These Thumbs Up
- Poor Sites: Journalists Gave These Thumbs Down
- About the Sites Studied
- About Participants
- Background
- Topics They Write About
- Nature of Publications Participants
Write For
- Methodology
- Site Usage
- Session Location
- Test Tasks and Discussion
- About Using This Methodology
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Test Participants
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Readership of the publications that participants contribute to ranged from less than 14,000 to more than two million. The average readership was about 500,000. Neither the journalists' names nor their affiliations can be disclosed since participants in usability studies are always promised full anonymity. However, following is a general description of the different publications they write for as either staff reporters or freelance journalists:
- 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
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Comparing the First and Second Editions
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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
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What You Get
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- 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?
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Who Should Read This Report?
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This report has important information for:
- 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.
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Download Report (from eSellerate) $248 for the PDF file (217 pages) $468 for site license to make
copies |
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Related Reports |
| Investor Relations (IR) area of corporate websites. Journalists often go there when looking for financial information.
"About Us" area of corporate websites.
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Alternative Payments |
If you do not want to buy online, we accept other forms of payment:
- Check
- Bank transfer
- Purchase orders
- Faxed or mailed credit cards
We can also send you a paper invoice if your company requires that.
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Download Time |
| The PDF document is a big file because of the many illustrations (10.5 MB). Downloads will take about this much time:
> Modem: 35 minutes
> Broadband: 3-4 minutes
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File Format Used |
The report is a standard PDF file, formatted to print on both 8.5x11 and A4 paper. Any recent version of the Acrobat Reader will suffice to read or print the file. No special software is needed. The file is not copy-protected: we trust you to buy a site license if you are going to have multiple people read the report.
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