Nielsen Norman Group Report:

Making it Easy for Users to Find Physical Locations:
21 Design Guidelines for Store Finders and Locators on Corporate Websites

66 pages PDF format
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Summary

The report contains:

• Results of usability tests of 10 location finder designs: what worked; what didn't
• The recommended task flow for location finding for different types of organizations
• Detailed design guidelines

The report contains 21 guidelines for improving the design of location finders.

The findings are based on usability testing of 10 corporate websites. The sites included Andersen (previously known as Arthur Andersen), the American Automobile Association (AAA), Bank of America, BMW, Caterpillar, Charles Schwab & Co., The Dow Chemical Company, Toys R Us, Verizon, and Wells Fargo.

The number of locations represented by each website ranged from a few hundred to several thousand.

Several forms of locators were represented, including:

• store finders
• office finders
• dealer finders
• ATM finders

On average, across the 10 sites, users were only successful finding appropriate locations 63% of the time. In other words, these companies may lose 37% of potential customer visits due to poor usability.

Richly illustrated with 43 color screenshots of locator designs that worked well or that caused problems in user testing.

Best Practices

Best practices are given for five types of location finders:

• Many locations that provide similar services
• Different types of products or services provided at different locations
• Locations in different countries
• Only a few locations, or if the locations are in geographically distinct areas
• Only one physical store or office

Table of Contents

1. Executive Summary
2. Study Overview
   • Introduction
   • Purpose of Study
   • General Procedure
   • Websites Studied
3. Success and Failure Rates
4. Organization of Locator Information Across Websites
5. Recommended Locator Process
   • General Process
   • If your company has international locations
   • If your company offers certain products or services only at some stores
   • If your company has only a few locations, or if the locations are dispersed in well-known areas
   • If your company has only one location
6. General Design Guidelines for a Locator
   • Checklist of Locator Design Guidelines
   • Compliance Rates for Locator Design Guidelines
7. Discussion and Examples for Locator Design Guidelines
   • Information on the Home Page
     4 design guidelines
   • Address Entry
     3 design guidelines
   • Categories and Lists
     2 design guidelines
   • Listing Information
     6 design guidelines
   • Graphics, Images, and Performance
     4 design guidelines
   • Printing Maps and Directions
     1 design guideline
   • Implementation and UI
     1 design guideline
8. Methodology
   • Overview
   • Particpants
   • Website Selection Criteria
   • Usage Order
   • Tasks
9. About the Authors
10. Acknowledgements

Who Should Read This Report?

This report has important information for:

• Anybody who is responsible for the design or implementation of a locator
• Intranet designers in companies with multiple locations: we often see that employees have difficulties getting directions to other company facilities from the intranet

Running a similar usability study yourself to collect comparative design lessons from a large number of websites would cost about $50,000 -- you get the research findings at 0.1% of the cost.

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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