Tài liệu e-National Bank:How to Establish Effective Communication ppt

INTERNET, SITE, USER, NATIONAL BANK OF UKRAINE, CENTRAL EUROPEAN BANK, FEDERAL RESERVE SISTEM, BUSINESS COMMUNICATION, CRITERIA, USABILITY, NAVIGATION, MENU, SCROLLING, GRAPHIC, FONT, BA

DONETSK NATIONAL TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES FOR PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION

Business Communication Curse Paper

Group # 8

e-National Bank:

How to Establish Effective Communication

Made by students: Artem Zinoviev – IBA02A Bogdan Meshko – IBA02B Max Bardega – IBA02A Helen Vyalova – IBA02A Dima Gasilo – IBA02A

Supervisor

N U Todorova

Donetsk 2005

FOREWORD

Finally, we have done it! Dozen of sleepless nights, dozen of

smoked cigarette packs, hours spend on the Internet and

hundreds cups of tee and coffee, - these are our losses while

doing this project But a lot of new acquired knowledge and

experience: work with MS Explorer and Opera, designing tricks,

HTML, structure of bank web-site, teamwork etc, - these plusses

easily paid off our efforts

Don’t be very strict while reading our paper because we went a

long distance to produce our brainchild and some mistakes are

still can be found We will be greatly pleased to hear Your critics

and we will take all of them into account in case we have to write

this (or another one of this kind) project again Thus do not

hesitate to mail us: artzinoviev@mail.ru

Great thanks to those who consulted us on designing issues:

Dima Pavlov (Playmarket, web-designer), Yana Glatkikh (Oxford

School, student, designer) Also special thanks to “Metro” Internet

provider

Team #8

SUMMARY

Report 35 pages 11 figures 1 table, 8 sources 3 appendixes

INTERNET, SITE, USER, NATIONAL BANK OF UKRAINE, CENTRAL EUROPEAN BANK, FEDERAL RESERVE SISTEM, BUSINESS COMMUNICATION, CRITERIA, USABILITY,

NAVIGATION, MENU, SCROLLING, GRAPHIC, FONT, BACKGROUND, JARGON,

INFORMATION

The problem of the report: how can the webmasters of central bank site improve the efficiency

of its communicative features? To solve the problem one have to answer the following questions: what aspects should be concerned to evaluate communicative features National Banks web sites from the point of an ordinary user and which site is less corresponding to these given criteria?

This report is devoted to analysis of the sites of European Union (www.ecb.int), Ukrainian (www.bank.gov.ua) and American (www.federalreserve.gov) central banks These sites provide the most reliable and up-dated information of economic situation within a country Efficiency of work with these sites (for users) depends on how these sites are organized from the business communicational point of view

The report contains 3 chapters In the first chapter we analyze specifics of central banks sites and develop correspondent criteria to evaluate them The second chapter is devoted to evaluation of the sites according to the criteria developed in the previous chapter It also includes comparative analysis of the sites In the final third chapter recommendations on improving the NBU site are given These recommendations reflect best sides of communication aspects of other two sites and personal thoughts of the research group about these sites

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1.1 Usability Of A Site 8 1.2 Verbal And Visual Rendering 11

1.3 Informational Content 13

2.1 Sites’ Description 16 2.1.1 National Bank Of Ukraine 16

2.1.2 European Central Bank 19

2.1.3 Federal Reserve System Of The USA 21

INTRODUCTION

In the fast changing world who has up-to-date and reliable information is able to influence current events Especially it concerns economic field where information changes every moment Nowadays the most convenient and easily accessible source of information is the Internet The most reliable source of information about financial situation of a country on the Internet provides institutions that regulate economy One of the most authoritative organizations among these institutions are central banks That is why we decided to write our report about web-sites

of these banks assuming them as a business communicative tool

For our research we have chosen sites of the following Central Banks:

- The National Bank of Ukraine (www.bank.gov.ua )

- The Central European Bank (www.ecb.int)

- Federal Reserve System of the USA (www.federalreserve.gov)

These sites represent different scale: The National Bank of Ukraine is the Central Bank of unitary country (also it’s site of our country), Federal Reserve System of the USA is the Central Bank of federal state and The Central European Bank that represents unity of European countries

The definition of the problem is: “How can the webmasters of central bank site improve the efficiency of its communicative features?” This problem requires solving of the following questions:

1 What aspects should be concerned to evaluate communicative features National Banks web sites from the point of an ordinary user?

2 Which site is less corresponding to our given criteria?

The purpose of the report is to give recommendations to the site that will get fewer points due

that have already been developed by other researchers We will base both on our own and other students experience and expectations of what they want to find on these sites

In the second chapter each site will be evaluated with the help of criteria named in the first chapter Than we will compare sites and define strong sides of each site and choose the one which gained the most points

Finally in the third chapter we will develop recommendations to the site that gains less points

in the previous chapter These recommendations will base on other sites we have evaluated and our own ideas concerning business communication efficiency

1 EVALUATION CRITERIA FOR NATIONAL BANKS SITES

What aspects should be taken into account to evaluate communicative features of national (central) banks web sites from the point of an ordinary user? To answer this question we should first specify some features that concern sites of National Banks

Firstly, these sites are non-commercial but informative thus they have no special appeal like

“buy our products” or “use our services”

Secondly, central banks sites purpose is to inform people about economic situation within a country (union of countries) and they are the first to provide this information because they receive this information directly from central banks Therefore this information might be demanded by foreigners that is why national banks sites should be multi-culturally oriented

Thirdly, National Banks sites (at least those we have overviewed) are designed and mastered

by special department which are structural units of these financial institutes

These features will automatically expulse the importance of hooking a client because he may

no find other sources of some specific information and focus our attention on what information site provides us with and of what quality it is

We are going to design some criteria from the user’s side Very specific technical terms are not of vital importance here Ordinary user is not aware of processor used to create a site, server, database program, type of graphic files etc He is interested in information, time that may consume to find this data and money he will pay for traffic or time spent on using the site1

(in case he should pay for it at all) This is the background to create any criteria to evaluate national bank site

We will formulate our criteria in questions If an answer on a particular question is “yes” than

we put “1” point Otherwise we put “0” point In this way it will be convenient to figure out the final result of each chosen site

Now let us talk more about what criteria we assume are important while evaluating a national bank site

1

Some Internet providers charge their users fees for amount of information downloaded from Internet Others charge for time spent in the net

1.1 USABILITY OF A SITE

If you are an ordinary user you visit a national bank site in order to find some information For instance, let it be a Balance of Payment2 in 2004 Is it is so then usability of site is how quickly you will find any reference on this particular issue How many mouse clicks may you do visit to reach this information?

Jasper Sprengers, the designer of Dutch web-design company Abeleto (www.abeleto.nl) defines usability as “the decisive quality criterion for a website” [3] In his work concerning usability of a web-site he says that this criterion is one that user defines but not experts “No objective method can tell us whether a website is really usable unless we have observed ordinary people using it” [3]

What we are going to do is also to use sites of Ukrainian, European Union and the USA central banks and give our say on how usable they are While using we will look at the following points:

Navigability

Navigation is a system that every web-site needs to orient its user where he is and where he can go [6, p 206] Therefore navigability is how easily a user can understand in what part of a web-site he is, find a link for the next part or turn back to previous one

Successful navigation system can spark user’s interest to use site further whereas unsuccessful one (or it absence at all) give user no chance to somehow learn the structure of a site and find information he is looking for

As far as navigability is concerned, while using each site we will answer the following questions:

1 Does site have any navigation system? It could be graphical and/or word hyperlinks

2 Is this navigation is intuitive, simple and obvious? It means how easily can user

understand where this or that navigation item leads?

3 “Can user with the help of site navigation jump to any part within it?” [1] This question is

about how navigation system covers sites structure The answer “yes” accounts for

2

Balance of Payment (POB) – systematic count on every business operation between resident of our country and foreigners Usually POB is an annual document To regulate POB is responsibility of national banks

menu that provide access to every site’s main structural unit Otherwise the answer is

“no”

Special print and save function

The nature of information that has been given on national banks sites is such that it sometimes needs to be printed or downloaded In case a page contains a lot of graphical elements it may be inconvenient to print it on black & white printer or save it on the HDD3 For this purposes special function can be designed that provides user with non-graphical copy of desirable information It could be either pdf (Adobe Acrobat Reader file) format, or doc (Ms Word file) or html (Ms Internet Explorer file) It may contain some graphic that illustrates content

of the information and some logos but nor navigation, nor big advertisement banners It saves both your ink and free megabytes

Figure 1.1 shows an example of copy function given to every article on www.economins.com web site This function generates html page with only site logo, one little advertisement and graphs that refer to the article

Fig 1.1 Example of a “Printable page” function on www.economist.com web-site

To define whether chosen sites provide this service we will ask the following question:

“Is there a separate link to a complete document for printing and saving?” [4]

The same question Mr Sprengers recommends in his evaluating criteria

Search system

Search system is very convenient in case user doesn’t know where he can find information he

is looking for If site has this service user may find any data he wants just typing a key words in the input area and than look through the links searching system has printed on user’s screen It

3

HDD – (abbrev the Hard Disk Driver) – the devise in computer that keeps all information that user saves

saves time that is vitally important in business The example of search system can be seen on figure 1.2

Fig 1.2 Search system on www.ati.com web-site

Concerning search system, we will look whether our chosen sites have it

If there is any search system on the site?

Vertical scrolling

Usually, users have 1024x768 display resolution In case information layout is bigger than user screen he has to scroll the window “Users may not notice there is content following if a small section of the screen is not visible While screen sizes vary both in inches and pixel-depth,

a good standard to work from would be 800x600 pixels, while making sure that content can always wrap and tables are sized relative to the window size”, says Jasper Sprengers [4] He also says that in case site has vertical scrolling it should not be more that 1,5 screens [4]

The next questions arise:

1 Can user see the whole first page without scrolling?

2 In case of documents or statistics, are they longer than ideal (1,5 screens)?

Size (in kilobytes) of the home page

The more size of a page the longer it loads Sometimes big first pages annoy users who have slow Internet speed In fact in our country most users connect to Internet via dual-up4 that is rather slow comparing with others methods of accessing

“The benefits of a page that loads quickly are nearly always greater than more impressive artwork, given average bandwidth” says Mr Sprengers [4]

4

Dual-up – method of the Internet accessing via the telephone line

Which site has the biggest first page? – This question we will answer The biggest page will

be assessed with “0” points, mid-sized – “1” and the lesser – “2” points

1.2 VERBAL AND VISUAL RENDERING These criteria are devoted to user’s perception of a site They refer to the language wed-designers use on their site, readability of the text, background of text area and its combination with text

Language

Language is correlated with user’s ability to understand what is written on a site That is why web-designers should carefully define the audience of their site and choose type of language that corresponds it In case national banks sites, user that visit them in order to find some information are at least in the know what national bank does (visiting without purpose is omitted)

If web-masters use language overloaded with special jargon it can cause one of the following reaction:

1 “the content is suspect and the language is being used to “hide” rather than reveal an understanding of the issue” [2];

2 “the content was developed by a person who does not understand the target audience” [2];

3 “the site is linking to technical sites without a careful review of the links or without appropriate identification of the site visitor” [2];

4 “the site has not clearly identified its audience” [2]

For national bank site purpose to show how knowledgeable its stuff is by using a lot of jargon

is not of paramount importance It first should make verbal layout understandable and only than fill it with some special economical terms

Spelling mistakes are also assumed as undesirable thing Of course it is mostly impossible to make no mistakes, but a lot of them really spoil “a spirit of science” that actually should be on sites like those of national banks

Do our sites’ web-masters follow the same idea as to language? We will check it with the following questions:

1 Does the site frequently use of economic jargon?

2 Are there spelling mistakes? We will check spelling mistakes by opening several saved pages in Word 2002 processor and check it for mistakes

Text and background

Combination of font color and type with background is the most to influence readability of text Compare four instances given in figure 1.3 (a–d) Figure 1.3 (a, b) shows combinations of font and background colors Most users will assume (b) figure as more readable than (a) Whereas figures (c) and (d) show different fonts on the same background The difference also speaks for itself – (c) is more or less readable comparing with (d)

Dmitriy Kirsanov, the author of book about web-design, says that “the first demand to the pair text and background is sufficient contrast between them that provides comfortable, easy reading” [6, p.132]

Bad example of font

Taking into account what was said, we should investigate the sites on the next matter:

Does combination of text and background provides comfortable and easy reading?

1.3 INFORMATIONAL CONTENT The main information we expect on national banks sites is legislative and regulation documents, statistics and reports Thus we can develop criteria that check whether site contains all information we need

Informational content is essential as far as business communication is concerned It defines what information and of what quality user can get on a site because this information may influence on his decision-making

Statistics, Publishing, News

There will be no questions to this criterion What we will do is rank sites according to the information they provide and how frequently they do it The more statistics, articles and documents we find the higher rate site gets What about quality of the info?

Therefore there three available rates: 3, 2, 1 The most informative site gets 3 and vice versa

In order to restrict our search we will look for information in “statistics”, “publishing” and “news” sections

Information on the First Page

Some information should be printed right on the first page It helps user who visits national bank site to get some information immediately without further using the site

Important information on the first page will be overviewed using the following checklist:

1 Physical address of the national bank on index page

2 Current economic indicators

3 E-mail address to send feedback to the web-masters (with mailto HTML tag 5 )

Informative page titles

At this point we will try to compare the title of a page and information it contains It’s also crucial that title corresponds with content because when user opens this or that page he first looks at title to foresee what he can learn from this page (at least rational user will do to safe his time)

Each site we chose will be characterized using the following question of Jasper Sprengers:

“Does the title of the page body explain what the page is about?”

1.4 MULTICULTURALITY

As we have sad at the beginning of this chapter sites of national banks may be visited be foreigners Thus it’s essential that these sites should have multinational support The most obvious support is language

Multi-Languages Support

Because people can find an access to any information through Internet this information should

be somehow universalized We conceder language – is the best tool to do this English, as the worldwide most spread language, can pretend to be this tool Thus, sites that will evaluate should have at least English version support and moreover this version should be up-dated as the national language In case of two or more national languages every of them should be equally up-dated

The following criteria occur:

Does the site provide up-dated multi-language support?

Intercultural Interactive

Foreign users may have some questions to the web-masters For example they can’t find some information of they don’t understand how this particular bank operates In these cases special FAQ (frequently asked questions) section should be provided

Also FAQ section can be useful for non-foreigners if they have some questions about central bank and its functions, responsibilities etc

Any other forms of intercultural interaction are also welcomed, e.g forum, chat or guestbook

Does the site have any form of intercultural interaction?

2 WEB SITES’ EVALUATION

In this chapter we will evaluate sites of National Bank of Ukraine, Central European Bank and Federal Reserve System of the USA taken into account our developed in the previous chapter criteria Also we will compare the results and define which site got the highest point and which site needs further development

1 Does site have any navigation system? Yes it has navigation system that is hyperlinks at

the top of the window (see figure 2.1)

Figure 2.1 Navigation system of www.bank.gov.ua

2 Is this navigation is intuitive, simple and obvious? Yes it is Knowing the basics of

economy we could easily foresee what means every hyperlink of the menu

3 Can user with the help of site navigation jump to any part within it? Yes, he can We

visited every unit of the menu and they did cover every section that site had

Special print and save function

4 Is there a separate link to a complete document for printing and saving?” Yes every

document has this function Statistical data has both *.pdf or *.xls6 format that is easy to

print and save Reports and statement are in *.pdf format

Search system

5 If there is any search system on the site? Yes, it has Navigation menu has special

section “Search” at the top right corner See figure 2.1

Vertical Scrolling

6 Can user see the whole first page without scrolling? No, he can’t At the first page we

had to scroll 1,5 window to reach the bottom

7 In case of documents or statistics, are they longer than ideal (1,5 screens)? Yes, we opened the first page and we had to scroll 3 windows

Size (in kilobytes) of the home page

8 Which site has the biggest first page? The first page has 245 kb Further answer needs evaluation of all sites (see point 2.2)

Verbal and Visual Rendering

Language

9 Does the site frequently use of economical jargon? Yes, it has a lot of jargon To get the meaning of documents user need to have deep knowledge in economics

10 Are there spelling mistakes? No, we found no mistakes in 4 overviewed articles

Text and background

11 Does combination of text and background provides comfortable and easy reading? Yes,

it has black font on white background that provides user with easy reading (See

appendix 1)

Informational Content

Statistics, Publishing, News

12 This criterion needs comparative analyses See point 2.2

Information on the First Page

6

Extension of Microsoft Excel file