A NEW study from influential Web usability firm Nielsen Norman Group provides some interesting insights into how potential investors actually use investor relations websites when assessing whether to invest in a company's stock.

Based on usability tests with 42 people, most of them inexperienced retail investors, the report says that IR websites are generally too complicated for many retail investors.

It also finds that the nine professional investors or analysts in the study rarely used IR websites for financial research, preferring to use richer resources like Bloomberg and Reuters. Institutional investors are more interested in "the story" behind the numbers and use IR websites for this type of information.

The report contains 65 guidelines for designing IR sites based on watching investors as they tried to complete assigned tasks. The guidelines have been covered on this site before and include such basics as including a clear link to your IR site on your company's homepage, to narrower guidelines.

Nonetheless, the study provides valuable insights and concrete affirmation from actual users of IR websites. If part of your objective is to provide prospective retail investors with the information they need to make a decision to invest in your company's securities, then this report will provide you with some useful guidelines.

Here are a few of the more interesting findings and guidelines from the report which support our own work:

Sites undermine their own credibility
According to one of the report's authors, Dr. Jakob Nielsen, widely viewed as the world's best known usability expert, IR sites undermine their credibility with investors in many ways.

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