Individual investors are intimidated by overly complex IR sites and need simple summaries of financial data. Both individual and professional investors want the company's maintain chronicle and investment vision.
Investor relations (IR) is one of the "titanic Four" standard components of a corporate website (along with public relations, employment, and "About Us") . In the unique world, investors grasp that they can go to http://www.company.com to research a current or potential investment.
While companies must provide IR information to attract and gain investors, they must also be realistic about the types of drawl and features that users need most. Simplicity and a coherent record about the company are better than drowning users in incomprehensible data.
User Research
To assess the usability of corporate websites' IR information, we conducted a series of user studies in four cities in the U.S. and the U.K.: current York, Boston, San Diego, and London. We chose these cities because they include both main centers of the investment business and more mainstream locations. We tested a total of 42 users: 28 individual investors and 14 professionals (institutional investors, financial analysts, and financial journalists) .
We observed users as they performed investment-oriented tasks on 20 company websites, selected to mask a range of industries and countries: Allied Domecq (UK), Biogen, Ceridian, Home Depot, InFocus, Interpublic Group, Johnson & Johnson, Labor Ready, Novo Nordisk (Denmark), Pacific Sunwear of California, Palm, Pfeiffer Vacuum Technology (Germany), Rowan Companies, Royal Bank of Scotland (UK), Stora Enso (Finland), Symantec, Starbucks, Tyson Foods, UPS, and Vodafone (UK) .
When asked to go to a company's website to research it as a potential investment, 40% of our test users guessed the URL, 36% dilapidated Google, and 24% primitive other search engines and Internet directories. This finding emphasizes the importance of having a guessable domain name and superb visibility in the main search engines.
Success Rate
We asked users to catch answers to nine specific IR-related questions on the websites. On average, users successfully completed 70% of these tasks.
This compares favorably with our other new Web usability studies, which typically recorded success rates between 55% and 65%.
Not surprisingly, the professionals scored higher than the "amateurs" in this peruse. The average success rate for the investment professionals was 75%, whereas the average success rate for the individual investors was 67%.
Despite these relatively high scores, there is unexcited expansive room for improvement: 35% of users couldn't fetch a copy of the company's latest quarterly narrate, and 77% couldn't gather the high/low share trace for an earlier quarter -- both very fundamental IR tasks.
Investment Professionals
We tested three categories of professionals: institutional investors who work for mutual funds or other companies that invest spacious sums; financial analysts and advisors who recommend investments to others; and journalists who write about finance for business publications or major newspapers.
All of the professional users had the same general conclusion: They would not rely on a company's bask in website for most finance data. Instead, they would exercise the specialized services that their companies subscribe to, such as Bloomberg, Reuters, and First Call. Investment professionals often rely on downloading big amounts of financial data into their bear modeling tools or spreadsheets, and they assume doing so in standardized formats from a single source so that they can easily compare multiple companies.
This does not mean that companies can ignore professionals when putting IR information on their maintain websites, but it does mean that companies must be resigned to having their websites play a secondary role in satisfying professionals' information needs.
Interestingly, even though professional users despised overly promotional or marketing-oriented information on company websites, they did like getting the company "jog" through such things as fresh CEO speeches that outlined goals and prospects. Professionals wanted management's vision of where the company was going, along with a brief company background and overview of unusual news. Basically, they wanted the company's past, declare, and future summarized in a blueprint that told the yarn tedious the numbers.
Individual Investors
Typically, private investors don't have access to professional data services, even though they often find data from their broker's website or from services like Yahoo Finance.
Individual investors are often intimidated by the huge amount of financial data available, even from these simplified services. While they expected websites to offer annual and quarterly reports, they admitted that they spent very exiguous time reading them.
Companies can succor individual investors by presenting simplified views of financial data and summarizing the highlights. Although you must offer more detailed data as well, users commented positively on websites that summarized well-known stock information on a single page.
Individual investors also wanted the company to allege them a fable about its potential as an investment. Key questions include:
Where does the company approach from?
What is it doing now?
What are its innovation and research prospects?
What is its vision?
designate, however, that there is a dissimilarity between telling a credible, shapely, and concise myth, and junking up people's browsers with superficial hype and marketing-oriented language. It's a handsome line, but an essential one if you want to convince investors of your company's prospects.
Standard Information Architecture
In most of our projects, we provide guidelines for interaction open and for principles of information gain. We usually cannot recommend the specific website structure, nor can we specify the labels needed for navigation systems. assume, for example, a company that sells five different kinds of X-ray machines for dentists, and a company that sells 10,000 different kinds of pumps and valves for OEMs. These two companies require very different information architectures for their website's product areas.
In inequity, shareholders and potential investors visiting a website's IR location have similar tasks, regardless of the company type. Also, the information that must be supplied to satisfy users' needs is vast the same.
Because users and their tasks highly overlap for websites' IR areas, we can recommend a standard information architecture based on our research of users' information needs and navigation behavior. If all websites organized their IR information accordingly, it would be substantially easier for users to research investments.
We actually recommend three different, but related, information architectures, depending on the resources a company wants to devote to online IR. These improper, medium, and high designs gradually add more features based on the priorities we derived from user research. With small resources, it's best to focus on the features that users need most, and implement them well, rather than clutter the situation with many poorly designed features.
Simple Information Design
IR areas are plagued by PDF files, probably because they're a cheap device to place annual reports online. It is indeed genuine to let users download fleshy reports, and you can effect a lot of money when people perform their possess printouts rather than requesting printed material by mail. But to notion information online in a device that lets them fleet understand key information, users need simpler formats that don't require them to slowly page through presentations that are optimized for print rather than interaction.
In our ogle, interactive stock charts were qualified prized, but often so difficult to manipulate that users couldn't score the overviews they wanted. To be useful to individual investors, graphing features and labels must be simplified; professionals are going to exercise their possess high-end tools anyway.
Potential For IR on the Web
IR is a natural for the Web. Investments are all about information, as the growth of online brokerage services shows. Similarly, companies can provide many types of IR services as self-service -- at hugely reduced costs -- as long as the user interface is sufficiently easy.
Investors, both individual and professional, want more than objective the data that independent services can provide. They want the company's earn legend and investment vision. What they don't want is to wade through complex or irrelevant information.
Balancing all this is the challenge for the IR user experience: You must provide both simplicity and vision, connect with investors without antagonizing them, and wait on both professionals and people with itsy-bitsy financial knowledge. To carry out this balance, your beget must focus on users' needs.
Our company, Investor Relations Marketing, offers publicly traded companies a variety of highly specialized services to quickly and cost effectively attract the long term, high net-worth retail and institutional investors that your company needs as shareholders.
By utilizing our services to fetch your company information out to the masses of stock investors, your company will receive the peek that it deserves.
Investor Relations Marketing's services are an easy and cost effective method to bag your corporate communication out to the masses of stock investors.
We only exhaust marketing strategies that have proven to be the most successful and resulted in achieving the highest obtain in a company's stock impress.
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