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Journalists often work under tight deadlines.
This statement may not seem like a brilliant new insight, but it leads directly to many of our guidelines for how to design corporate websites that are both usable for journalists and deliver the desired public relations impact. Most of the PR sections of sites we have studied failed to support journalists in their quest for facts, information, and points of contact that they can use when they write stories about companies or their products. Websites must be painfully clear about what a company does and what products and services it offers. Websites for high-tech start-ups are notorious for presenting generic, buzzword-filled mission statements that could apply equally well to both their worst competitors and companies producing completely different products. Websites must provide fast access to basic facts and figures, as well as a simple way to contact a live human being in the PR department. Journalists don’t have time to wade through deep, complex navigation trees or sift factual wheat from marketing chaff. In particular, pages must present information in well-organized chunks that are easy to scan. Distracting animations and irrelevant stock photography of smiling people do not help journalists who are in a hurry to find facts. If journalists cannot find what they are looking for on a website, it could impact whether they include information about that company in the story. Journalists repeatedly said that poor website usability could reduce or completely eliminate their press coverage of a company. For example, after having a difficult time using a site, one journalist said:
Another journalist described what he'd do when he could not find a press contact, or any of the facts he needed for his story:
Many journalists are freelancers or work from home, typically using slow dial-up connections. Many have old computer equipment and do not feel an obsessive need to download all the latest software. Thus, non-standard data formats or cutting-edge technologies tend to clog their limited Internet connections and sometimes even crash their computers. It is wise to ensure that all your Web pages work on low-end home computers running several years' old software. We recommend that sites present all press information as simple, standard HTML, designed for minimal download times. |
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Journalists' Information Needs |
The Web is one of the most important research tools for journalists. When asked how they would get basic information about a company, all the journalists in our study said that they would begin by doing some Web research. About half the journalists started by visiting the target company’s website; the other half started by searching an outside service (mainly Google, but also traditional services like Dow Jones Interactive and Lexis-Nexis). This finding emphasizes the necessity for having a clean corporate website with a clearly labeled Press or PR section that can quickly provide answers for journalists. It also emphasizes the need to be well represented in external search services and databases, especially since the trend over time is that more journalists are relying on search engines (mainly Google at the time of this writing).
Journalists are not gullible, and they do not take a company’s own word as truth. On the contrary, they almost all stressed that press releases are useful only to find out how a company is trying to position itself. We strongly recommend that a company’s PR area have links to external sources, including press coverage, since articles from independent newspapers and magazines are often considered to be much more credible than the company's own press releases. We have seen similar findings in studies of prospective customers evaluating products on consumer- and business-oriented sites, so links to external press coverage will also help promote sales. The top-five reasons journalists gave for visiting a company's website are:
This basic information must be easy to find and should be cleansed of the marketese and excessive verbiage that smother the facts on many sites. |
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Success Rate: 70% |
In our usability study, thirty-two journalists attempted to use the press areas of eighteen websites to gather information for hypothetical story assignments. Among other tasks, the journalists tried to find basic information about each company’s financials, management, commitment to social responsibility, and PR telephone number.
On average, journalists found the answer to each one of these simple questions 70% of the time. In some ways, a 70% task success rate is a reasonably good outcome for a Web usability study. In a study of 20 B2C e-commerce sites, we measured an average success rate of 56% for shopping tasks; success rates around 50-60% are the norm in many Web usability studies. There are two reasons that this study had a slightly higher success rate than other studies:
A website success rate of 70% implies the site has a failure rate of 30%, which is considered an unacceptably low quality level for more traditional products. It is astounding that we have become so accustomed to seeing difficult websites that we can consider a 30% failure rate a reasonably positive outcome when it comes to usability. To look at our results in another way, leaving 30% of press inquiries unanswered would be considered a very poor performance for most traditional PR departments. Luckily, the situation is improving. We conducted this research in two rounds. In the first study the success rate was only 68%; by the time of the second study, the success rate had increased to 73%. Even better, our two rounds of testing revealed that the biggest improvement in success rate was for the most critical of the tasks: finding the PR contact's telephone number. Although a website can answer many basic questions and provide them great help, journalists still almost always want to talk to a person. In the first round, our test users found a PR telephone number only 55% of the time, but by the second round, the success rate for this key task had reached 82%. Here are two quotes from journalists who had a particularly difficult time trying to find a PR contact and financial information:
The ability to find information on a PR site has a strong impact on the journalists' impression of the site and thus on the way they perceive the company. Sites where users have a high success rate are rated highly, and sites where they have a lower success rate are rated much lower, as shown in the correlation diagram in this report. The correlation between the success rate and subjective satisfaction is r=.63, which is a fairly strong outcome for a human factors experiment. |
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International Usability |
All companies, except maybe the corner grocery store, need an international business strategy for their websites. This is true for a site's e-commerce offers, for customer service, for content strategy, and it's true for PR. Don't ignore international PR because you assume your overseas agencies are handling it. Even if they do a good job, your corporate website still plays a role in international PR, since journalists from all countries are likely to visit the site.
Usability for domestic users was not good, and it was a little worse for overseas users. Among our test users, we included journalists from both the United States and Europe, and we included both U.S. and European companies among the tested sites. Usability dropped slightly when a test had an international component, such as testing a European company with U.S. journalists or a U.S. company with European journalists. We have seen more severe findings in much of our other usability research. In general, international usability is sorely neglected on the Web today. This is true despite the fact that it’s called the World Wide Web and the even more important fact that any website will attract international users the moment it is placed on the Internet. Providing a perfect site for international users can be difficult, but the most basic guidelines for international usability are reasonably simple. For example, we had cases where journalists thought that a list of press releases contained nothing but old news because of a violation of one of the most basic internationalization guidelines: Use proper date formats. When the top press release on a site was dated 10-03-2000, a European user naturally assumed that it had been released on the 10th of March and concluded that the site was stale. This test session was conducted in late 2000, and the press release was in fact dated October 3rd, something that would have been communicated better by spelling out the name of the month in the date. |
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Design Guidelines |
This report contains seventy-five design guidelines that, if followed, will improve the usability of a corporate website's PR area. Most of these guidelines may seem fairly obvious. Because the usability field aims to make user interfaces simple and easy to understand, our design guidelines are almost always grounded in common sense. In the world of Web design, however, common sense is not nearly common enough. For example, the eighteen sites we studied in this project complied with only 69% of our advice about how to present press releases online.
To improve the usability of your website PR efforts, we recommend the following process. First, conduct an internal audit. Take a hard look at your site relative to the design guidelines in this report. Count how many guidelines you systematically follow, how many you systematically violate, and how many you follow only sporadically. Assign fractional credit for partial compliance, using a rough estimate of how frequently a given guideline is followed or violated. Average your score across all the guidelines. Ideally, you should have about 90% compliance. If your score is less than 75%, your PR area probably has severe usability problems and is far from fulfilling its potential. If your score is lower than 50%, you probably need an urgent redesign. Second, take one more hard look at your online PR information and determine how well it supports the journalists' tasks and preferences described in this report. If journalists arrive at your homepage under extreme deadline pressure, will they get what they need? Impress on all your writers, designers, and other PR site staff how important it is to deliver concise answers to users' questions. Third, consider conducting your own usability testing, using methods similar to those described at the end of this report. Ask reporters who cover your industry to test your site. This is guaranteed to reveal numerous opportunities for usability improvement. We tested the PR sections of eighteen websites, including major multi-national companies, high-tech start-ups, and government agencies. Every site 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. Don't bet on your site being the first exception to this finding. Instead, use this report to help discover the usability issues with your site, and fix them. |
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Study Overview |
The purpose of our research project was to learn which website designs are easy or difficult for journalists to use and why. We studied how journalists find information on the Web, and what impact site usability has on them.
This study was conducted in two stages. In the first stage we studied twenty journalists: fifteen based in New York City and five in Copenhagen, Denmark. In stage two, twelve journalists participated: two based in New York City, six based in Boston, and four based in London. Participants were given tasks to perform and were asked to think out loud as they worked. We studied websites from eighteen companies of varied sizes and from different industries. Most sites were American companies, but some were European. The sites we tested were:
For more thorough information about methodology, users, and site selection, refer to the following sections of this report: About the Sites Studied, About Participants, and Methodology. By the time you read this, several of the websites will have updated their design. This is fine. In fact, we hope that all of the sites will remove all of the usability problems we found. The screenshots in the report and our comments refer to the designs that were in place during our user tests. The lessons learned are still valid and are still useful for other sites, even after the site where we observed a mistake has stopped making that mistake. |
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About the Second Edition |
Our user research was conducted in two rounds. Findings from the first round of testing were described in the first edition of this report. This second edition is based on the findings from both rounds of testing. The second round of testing basically confirmed everything we had found in the first round, and we have not retracted or invalidated any of the guidelines we presented there. This fact may seem remarkable, given the rapid changes in computers and the Internet during the time between the two testing rounds. Basically, however, human factors is about humans, not about computers or the economy. What's easy in a user interface is determined by basic human capabilities and needs, which don't change. As long as journalists have the same brainpower year after year, and as long as they write articles the same way, guidelines for how to design usable PR sections for corporate websites will remain fairly stable. There have been a few changes, of course. In earlier years, it was quite common for PDF documents or other non-standard data formats to crash journalists' computers. Now, such crashes are less frequent. Still, the basic guideline to refrain from dumping users into a PDF document remains true. While doing so is no longer as risky -- you're less likely to totally lose users due to crashes -- PDF is still a less pleasant format for navigation, search, and reading on the Web, and should not be the primary vehicle for delivering online information. As for the report itself, the second edition contains more and newer screenshots, but the old screenshots remain as valuable as ever as a learning resource. Whether or not the company in question has updated its website is irrelevant; you can still learn from users' positive and negative experiences of interacting with those screens. More test data and more screens are obviously beneficial, but it would be a mistake to think that the new screenshots are more interesting or valid than the old ones. The second edition also contains more guidelines than the first edition. One reason is obviously the traditional second-edition syndrome. Authors always want to make their new edition better than the old one, so they work hard to present better insights than when they first wrote about a topic. We are no different. A second, and more important, reason is that we discovered more issues during the second round of testing because we could get beyond many of the original issues. For example, as mentioned above, fewer sites now make the mistake of making the PR person's contact information impossible to find. Great, but this also meant that the test sessions could move on, and we could observe what journalists did next and what additional problems they encountered. Also, just because the original design guideline about contact information is now more widely followed doesn't mean that we can remove it from this new edition. Thus, the number of guidelines tends to grow over time, as past issues become less prevalent, but still need to be documented to prevent new designs from committing old sins. |
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Authors |
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