User Experience is the New PR with Jakob Nielsen

The New York Times calls Jakob Nielsen “the guru of Web page usability” so those are their words, not mone.

And U.S. News and World Report calls him “the world’s leading expert on Web usability.” Jakob holds 79 United States patents, mainly on ways of making the internet easier to use.

When I launched iPRSoftware, the world’s first online newsroom service for public relations professionals, Jakob has just released a report on online newsroom design best practices so I interview him about it and this is that recording.

At the time, I was very focused on building the best online newsrooms sections of corporate websites. I spent many hours working as a public relations person in event pressrooms, and I designed my company’s user interface based on those real world experiences.

This is an interview I did as part of my own research with user experience and web usability Jakob Nielsen about the benefits an online pressrooms, the role online newsrooms play in managing reputations, and integrating an online newsrooms into a corporate websites.

Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., is a principal at the Nielsen Norman Group, and the author of the best-selling book Designing Web Usability, which has sold more than a quarter of a million copies in 21 languages.

SHOW NOTES:

4:11 – Jakob Nielsen on whether it is important for corporations to have an internet pressroom.

6:23 – Nielsen talks about the role internet pressrooms play in shaping reputation online: “…the pressroom is where to go and get it [information about a company]. So, companies that really want to communicate online should use this ability to reach both to the media and also directly to the public.”

7:48 – Nielsen on whether there is a correlation between the user experience of a website and the perceived competency of an organization’s staff: “That’s sort of the sad thing about doing these user studies…how often we see people being very disappointed in, even major corporations, their level of commitment to online service.”

9:35 – Nielsen talks about the potential impact of the failure of a company to deliver basic information in its internet pressroom.

11:47 – Nielsen on whether flash animation is an impediment or a benefit to a corporate internet pressroom.

13:19 – Nielsen talks about whether there is a relationship between how easy it is to find an organization online and how that organization is perceived by the searcher: “…users are getting more and more search dominant as the years go by…it’s well worth the effort to really go into search engine optimization because that is just so much the way people find things on the web today.”

14:58 – Nielsen on the terms to use to label an internet pressroom: “…people really know what you mean when you say pressroom.”

16:00 – Nielsen talks about the common mistakes companies make when integrating an internet pressroom into their websites. 18:05 – Nielsen answers a question about whether an internet pressroom creates more or less work for a public relations practitioner.

19:40 – Nielsen on the challenges organizations face when implementing an internet pressroom.

21:25 – Nielsen on who should be responsible for the internet pressroom.

22:35 – Nielsen talks about how information should be displayed in an internet pressroom to be useful for an international audience. 24:03 – Nielsen on where it is best to include press contacts and time zones within an internet pressroom.

25:55 – Nielsen talks about listing a phone contact versus an email contact.

29:30 – Nielsen talks about his most surprising findings while conducting a study on web usability.

29:50 – Nielsen explains what eyetracking is and the indications of his findings on eyetracking: “…the more we study users I think the more we recognize…it’s really important to prioritize and be brief and quick and to the point, and also to have the information formatted so that its very easy to scan.”

32:29 – End.

Photo by Noah Da CostaAOP

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