It’s Not All About Us (It’s Really About Our Users)

Web usability expert Jakob Nielson just released a new study that I think every marketing manager with a company website ought to pay attention to. It’s about your company’s About Us page.

The study, released last week, follows up on an earlier study done five years ago and looks at 63 websites from large, medium and small companies, government, and nonprofits. You can read the executive summary on Nielson’s Alertbox website or download the whole thing for a reasonable price (compared to most studies like this) if you want to see the dirt on the company sites with usability problems or see examples of good About Us pages. But here is some of what he says about putting your best face forward on these important pages, along with some of what I’ve seen of this in my own experience.

“On each site, we gave users one open-ended task: evaluate the organization. We also gave them several directed tasks, such as to find out who runs the organization, what community or social programs the organization contributes to, and when the organization was founded.”

There was some good news and some bad news on these tasks. First, usability for those pages had actually increased by (what Nielson calls) an acceptable 9% in five years, but the bad news was that when users were asked to find out what the organizations actually do success rates went down from 90% to 81% in the last five years. Apparently, a trend has emerged where marketing execs are more interested spewing “marketese and blah, blah” about what they do, than being clear.

I do a lot of research via company websites and I see this type of mistake a lot. They usually say something like, “We deliver you the most innovative solutions in multiple languages to give you improved outcomes and a more impactful position in a unique marketplace within all industries.”
What!? But what do you do? It kills all your credibility to be so vague that you appear to be trying to be all things to all people. Nielson has this to say about credibility:

“Trust and credibility are major issues on the Web, where even the biggest company exists as only a few words and pictures in a browser window. The most deceitful and unethical company can look as good as a company with a long history of community involvement and honest customer relationships. Explaining who you are and where you come from does matter, as do simple things like providing management biographies and photos.”

Nielson, gives some great free advice in his executive summary. For example he suggests web designers have a homepage link that simply says About Us or About Company Name since this is what most users are accustomed to. In his study users had trouble deciphering the meaning of nonstandard terms like  Info Center or other descriptors, so it’s best to use what is familiar, rather than trying to be different.

And it’s important to be sure the content on your About Us page says clearly who you are, becuase as Nielson says, this is pretty much the content you want all other content based upon, so it’s important to nail it down tight—without the marketese and blah, blah. He then goes on to recommend a hierarchical structure for the rest of your About Us information (more free advice):

“We recommend providing About Us information at 4 levels of detail:

• Tagline on the homepage: A few words or a brief sentence summarizing what the organization does.
• Summary: 1-2 paragraphs at the top of the main About Us page that offer a bit more detail about the organization’s goal and main accomplishments.
• Fact sheet: A section following the summary that elaborates on its key points and other essential facts about the organization.
• Detailed information: Subsidiary pages with more depth for people who want to learn more about the organization.

Nielson explains the effectiveness of this approach through a good example (Alcoa) and bad example (US General Services Administration).  Search these yourself and see if you don’t agree.

This is just an overview, so if you want to read the study information that supports these ideas, or you need some type of metrics to convince your boss, you might consider reading the entire report, but Nielson’s exec summary has even more valuable information than I can talk about here. So, I’ll leave you with Nielson’s bottom line on this:

“The Web is very depersonalized, but from our earliest usability studies, we’ve seen that users like getting a sense of the company behind the website.

Having a good About Us section facilitates this understanding. Clearly stating what you do helps customers understand your site as a whole. Of course, your overall site is what ultimately represents your organization to users. People look at product pages and read the site’s content when they’re evaluating an organization as a possible vendor, business partner, employer, investment, or (in the case of charities) donation recipient. Communication isn’t restricted to About Us. But dedicating an area to providing users with facts about your organization and its history and values helps pull all of the site’s content together.”