Email Newsletter Usability
Executive Summary
By Hoa Loranger, Chris Nodder, and Jakob Nielsen
Summary
Many business-to-business (B2B) sites are stuck in the 1990s in their attitude toward
the user experience. Most B2B sites emphasize internally focused design, fail to
answer customers’ main questions or concerns, and block prospects’ paths as they
search for companies to place on their shortlists. These sites haven’t realized that
the Web has reversed the company–customer relationship. Most online interactions
are demand-driven: you either give people what they want or watch as they
abandon your site for the competition’s.
The result of poor design on B2B sites? In our user testing, B2B sites earned a mere
58% success rate (measured as the percentage of time users accomplished their
tasks on a site). In contrast, mainstream websites have a substantially higher
success rate of 66%.
Considering that there’s immensely more money at stake for B2B than for business-
to-consumer (B2C), it’s astounding that B2B sites offer a much worse user
experience.
USER RESEARCH
To discover the usability guidelines for good B2B design, we conducted several
rounds of qualitative user research. We collected empirical evidence about the
behavior, needs, and preferences of actual users from a broad spectrum of
businesses. Our participants’ job titles varied widely, from VPs, business owners, and
engineers, to marketing directors, buyers, and administrative assistants.
We conducted most sessions in the U.S. (in California, Washington, and Arizona),
and a smaller number of sessions in the U.K. to insure the international applicability
of the findings.
We combined three different research methods to gain a deeper understanding of the
complex issues in B2B usability:
Focus groups. We moderated twelve focus groups. Our goal was two-fold: to
understand the range of participants’ research and purchasing processes, and
to prioritize B2B site features that help facilitate those processes. Focus
groups are a lousy method for evaluating actual websites or specific design
ideas, so we didn’t use them for this purpose.
User testing. In this section, fifty-five business users tested live websites in
one-on-one usability sessions. Individual users performed tasks related to
their actual jobs on sites that targeted their circumstances. We asked users to
verbalize their thinking and observed and recorded their behavior. Because
this method looks at what people do, it’s superior to focus groups for
assessing the designs that actually work, versus the designs that people think
will work.
Field studies. We visited seven companies to observe users working in their
natural environments. (Some people use the term “ethnography” to describe
site visits, but you can do field observation without giving it a fancy name.)
In all, our study group included seventy-nine participants (thirty-nine males and
forty females), with an even distribution of age groups. Most users were between 30
and 59 years of age, with a smaller number of users in their 20s or 60s. Participants
were also evenly distributed in terms of the size of the companies they worked for,
which ranged from small (1–35 employees) to large (more than 3,500 employees).
Study participants tested 179 B2B websites—far more than we typically test in our
studies. In this case, however, the large number was necessary because of the B2B
sector’s extreme diversity.
B2B VS. B2C
B2B site goals are substantially more complex than those on the typical B2C site.
This is the one excuse B2B sites have for their bad usability. In reality, however, the
more complex the scenario, the higher the need for supportive user interfaces. Thus,
B2B sites ought to emphasize usability more, not less, because they must help users
accomplish more advanced tasks and research more specialized products.
B2B purchases are often big-ticket items or service contracts. The sites’ products and
services are often extremely specialized, with complex specifications. Finally,
decisions made on B2B sites can have long-term implications: customers aren’t just
making a one-time purchase, they’re often buying into a long-term vendor
relationship that includes support, follow-up, and future enhancements and add-ons.
For all these reasons, research and multi-criteria decision-making dominate the B2B
user experience. B2B sites must provide a much wider range of information than
what’s common in B2C. A B2B site has to offer simple facts that are easily and
quickly understood by an early prospect who’s just looking around to see what’s
available. It must also offer in-depth white papers and information to help prospects
understand concepts like total cost of ownership, ROI, and whether and how the
product or service will integrate with the customer’s existing environment.
Another major difference is that B2C users are typically buying for themselves. They
therefore use a one-person decision process: a single user provides the budget and
approval, researches the options, makes the decision, completes the purchase,
receives the shipment, and uses the product. In contrast, in B2B, each of these steps
might involve different people and different departments.
A B2B site must address many different types of users with quite different needs. On
the basis of our user research, we defined five personas to represent the main
classes of B2B users:
Sam the Small Business Saver
Ashley the Office Admin
Erin the Enterprise Employee
Barbara the Boss
Pat the Professional Purchaser
Again, this added complexity only strengthens the argument for B2B sites to
emphasize usability in their design.
“ADD TO CART” VS. SUPPORTING THE FULL BUYING PROCESS
One of the biggest differences between B2B and B2C might be that most B2B
companies don’t seem to see themselves as engaged in e-commerce. Perhaps this is
because most B2B sites don’t have shopping carts. The typical B2B product can’t be
purchased through a simple Add to cart button: it might be custom-made, for
example, or require other forms of handholding. Also, prices might not be fixed, but
rather adjusted to each customer.
However, the lack of an Add to cart button doesn’t mean that B2B vendors should
ignore their websites. The site should still support the many other stages of the
buying process—including the post-sales stages, which are crucial to customers’
long-term brand loyalty. In fact, many complex products require supplies, spare
parts, or other consumables that are perfectly suited to traditional e-commerce.
Most important, B2B sites can be great lead generators. Prospects use websites
during their initial research and stick with the helpful sites during subsequent
research.
The website represents the company to prospects. In today’s world, people don’t
always save brochures and advertisements, because they assume they can find
equivalent information on the Web when the need strikes. Most of our users also said
that when they were thinking of doing business with a company, one of their first
actions was to check out its website. Thus, a site that inadequately communicates
the credibility of a vendor and its products can seriously deter incoming leads—long
before your official sales efforts begin.
One reason so many B2B sites have poor usability might be because they’re less
directly accountable for sales. On a classic B2C e-commerce site, every single design
decision directly and measurably affects the site’s conversion rate and other metrics,
such as the average shopping cart size. Many B2C sites are religious in their
observance of e-commerce usability guidelines because they know from their own
statistics how much money they lose every time they get usability wrong.
In contrast, because B2B sites don’t close sales online, they can turn away the vast
majority of users and never know how many sales they’ve lost. A company can
determine how its site helps or hinders users only by conducting user research with
representative customers—something most companies don’t do. Given our
experiences in testing 179 B2B sites, we can safely predict that most companies
would be shocked if they ever tested their own sites.
USER-HOSTILE DESIGN
B2B sites often prevent users from getting the information they need to research
solutions. Sometimes this is deliberate, as when sites hide the good stuff behind
registration barriers. Other times it’s inadvertent, as when confusing navigation
prevents users from finding information, or when the information they do find is so
voluminous and convoluted that they can’t understand it.
A simple example: Many sites use segmentation, in which users must click through
to the appropriate site segment. Unfortunately, these segments often don’t match
the way customers think of themselves, and thus require them to peek through
multiple site areas to find the right one. Even a simple segmentation such as
company size isn’t obvious. What counts as small? Better sites will annotate their
choices with a definition (stating, for example, that their small business segment
targets companies with less than 100 employees).
Another common B2B tactic is to require users to register or complete lead-
generation forms. Users are very reluctant to do this, however. If your site wants to
pursue this approach, you should at least follow registration form guidelines to make
your forms easier to complete. In most cases, however, we recommend moving
more information outside the barrier so it’s available to users during their initial
research. You must establish a certain level of credibility before people are willing to
give out their contact information. Business people are too busy these days to have
time for sales calls—unless they think the vendor is likely to offer something they
want.
The product information that you make available without registration must be
complete enough for users to judge whether your solution applies to their
circumstances. In our study, incomplete product descriptions were the cause of much
skepticism. At the same time, you can’t just dump everything on a first-time visitor.
Even if you sell highly technical products to a highly specialized audience, you can’t
assume that all users understand industry jargon or the key considerations that
distinguish your product from the competition. Provide helpful summaries and guides
to educate new users. If you can frame how people think about their problems,
you’re half way to selling them.
The most user-hostile element of most B2B sites is a complete lack of pricing
information. And yet, when we asked users to prioritize which of twenty-eight types
of B2B site information mattered most to them, prices scored the highest by far
(29% higher than product availability, which ranked second).
Sites have many excuses for not wanting to display prices, but they are just that:
excuses. Users expect to get a basic understanding of products and services during
their initial research, and they can’t do that without some idea of what it’s going to
cost. Even if your company can’t list exact prices, there are several ways to indicate
price level, which is really all people need initially.
We tested many B2B sites with good design elements: navigation that worked,
useful product descriptions, informative comparison charts, enticing up-sells, helpful
support, instructive white papers, and so on. We know these sites can be done well.
Unfortunately, the good designs were few and far between.
The average B2B user experience is not very supportive of customers. As a result,
the websites fail to provide business value because they ultimately turn prospects
away rather than turning them into leads. The only good news in this assessment is
that most sites can dramatically enhance their business value by simply following a
few more usability guidelines, and thereby offer a more customer-centered
environment. It’s time to upgrade B2B to the level of user experience that
mainstream websites have long offered.
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B2B Website Usability:Guidelines for Converting Business Users into Leads & Customers
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