Nielsen Norman Group Report:

"About Us": Usability Guidelines for Presenting Company Information on Corporate Websites

 

124 pages PDF format
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Summary

 Representing a company or organization on the Internet is one of a website's most important jobs. Explaining the company's purpose and what it stands for provides essential support for any of the site's other goals. Unfortunately, most websites do a poor job on this explanation.

The report contains 50 guidelines for improving the design of "about us" areas of corporate websites, and is richly illustrated with 85 color screenshots from many different websites, showing usability problems we found in our testing as well as examples of highly-usable "about us" pages.

This report shows what happens when real users try to use the information an organization presents about itself on its website.

We observed users as they performed both exploratory and directed tasks on fifteen websites, selected to cover a range of organizations:

  • Large companies: Allstate, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Lexmark, and Sempra Energy
  • Medium-sized companies: Constellation Brands, Titan, and Pier 1 Imports
  • Smaller companies: GiftTree, OneCall, and Team Industrial Services
  • Government agencies: the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of the Interior, and the Small Business Administration
  • Non-profits: National Multiple Sclerosis Society and the United Nations Children's Fund

Table of Contents

 124-page report.
  1. Executive Summary
    • User Research
    • Success Rate: Reasonable
    • What the Company Does
    • Helping Outsiders
    • Transaction Sites and Online Services
    • Connecting to Users
  2. Research Overview
  3. Company Reputation Affects Web Searching Behavior
  4. Success Rates and Satisfaction Ratings
  5. Average Satisfaction Ratings
  6. Prioritizing Corporate Information
  7. Guidelines Summary
  8. Design Guidelines
    • Homepage
    • Company Information
    • History and Timelines
    • Executive Members
    • Social Responsibility
    • Accolades
    • Contact
    • E-commerce Customer Service
    • Non-Profit and Charitable Organizations
    • Content
    • Navigation
    • Graphics and Multimedia
    • Presentation
  9. Methodology
    • Participants
    • Task procedure
    • Open-ended Tasks
    • Directed Tasks

What You Get
  • Checklist of 50 specific design recommendations: review your website and its "about us" section for these 50 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 users behave when using a wide variety of corporate sites, including extensive quotes (often colorful, because they were often annoyed). Learn from the users' comments and reactions to common design mistakes in the "about us" sections we tested.
  • 85 screenshots of company info pages with descriptions of why they worked well for users or caused them problems in usability testing.
  • $80,000 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?

 This report has important information for:
  • Anybody who is responsible for the design or content of an organization's website.
  • 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 would cost more than $80,000 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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