Pfizer site review

Pfizer Inc. is a commercial research-based pharmaceutical company with global operations.

Purpose and Target Audience

Its web site, www.pfizer.com, is meant to provide information to customers, potential employees, investors, and the general public.

Content

Pfizer's content is impressive.  Some sections, such as invesment information, smacked of shovelware.  However others, such as history, were clearly designed for the web site and were pretty well done too.  They essentially have a whole ’nother web site to promote the company to potential employees.

For the most part the writing was tight and pages kept short, that is, the content was usually chunked.  I saw no spelling or grammar mistakes. Scannability was clearly considered at times, such as this longer page in the employment section.  Naturally I can't tell if there was 50 percent less text than they would put in their paper brochures, but (as the just-cited page also shows) a tendency towards grandiose or marketing language remains.

Site Plan and Navigation

The logo always takes you back to the home page.  This is the main form of navigation but it works, mostly people don't need to look at both animal and people products on the same visit to the site or anything like that.

Sometimes they weren't good enough at telling you where you were going, such as this kid-centered page in the science section which came as a bit of a surprise.

Navigation in the subsites varied, but there too you were generally left without much navigation between hierarchies and sometimes only a link all the way back to Pfizer's main home page.  In one example, they even failed to make the logo a link.  This product page in the Animal Health section has the navigation on the bottom where a globe is supposed to stand for Animal Health. Right.

Links

Pfizer provides links relevant to its topics, and some thought appears to have been put into the selection of these links.  However, they were not well documented; Pfizer did not provide the user with information about these related sites.

Page Design and Creativity

This logo, with some variation, graces the top left corner of every page. 

Although the history section uses frames no frame-inside-itself linking mistakes were made and the inability to link or bookmark a particular page within one sub sub-site isn't major.

Plenty of graphics and goodlooking rollovers gave the page that professional feel.  The site did not have a consistent feel at all places, however.

Functionality

Pfizer.com took over thirty seconds to display content and over ten seconds more to fully load (with a T1 connection) the first time I opened it.  (On later attempts the 78.2 kilobyte page displayed much faster and fully loaded in 20 seconds.)  Pfizer violates Nielsen’s maxim that “the best sites are fast.”  In his “Future Predictions” chapter he re-emphasizes that bandwidth will be increasing slowly and that “Web design needs to cater to the masses.”  Interior pages such as Animal Health could take over 30 seconds to load but the text usually displayed earlier.  Nielsen would like these pages to display in a maximum of ten seconds.  In general I put the site on the edge between acceptable and unacceptable response times.

Pfizer’s main sections list down the left-hand side do nothing by themselves to indicate that they are links but instead a disjoint rollover turns the picture next to them into a brief description of that section of the site that points at the link.  The problem is that for up to a minute after loading the page there may be absolutely no reaction to rolling your mouse over the main navigation.

Another, strictly appearance-related, problem with this particular feature is that some of the time the background of the disjoint rollover is off-color.

Product and health information for both people and animals were both given in drop down forms- but for people you had to press go and for animals it took you immediately.  A little confusing.

Unique Feature

A unique feature is a page to tell you when you leave the site through an outside link that they are not responsible for, such as those in a dropdown list on their Animal Health page.  Unfortunately, they do not simply tell you this before you follow the link, the page of course slows your progress to your destination, and it makes using the back button to get back to Pfizer’s own site more awkward.

Conclusion

Does Pfizer score a “HOME-RUN” with Jakob Nielsen as umpire?  I consider the content high quality and it is often updated, but the download time is far from minimal.  In terms of ease of use, most of the site was but the business page was abysmal.  For example, I found the introduction of this “molecule-nav” image map a bad idea.

Pfizer's site was relevant to users' needs and sometimes unique to the online medium.  As far as having a net-centric corporate culture, they don't seem to be there yet but they look like they are heading in that direction.

E-mail: melancon@student.umass.edu