Web pages of three multinational companies addressing consumer items: are they economically designed?

The kind of global village that is developing today demands a new ´communication culture´ to reshape the upcoming civilization of tomorrow. Communicating with various consumers and types of people from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds would surely be an uphill task for the trades. Using the same language, same framework of communication and the same value systems for catering to the needs of different demographic groups around the world and different segments of consumers would give birth to a ´non-communication´ network. To overcome this undesirable situation in global communication, the only way out is to test the message contents ´ergonomically´ before communicating the messages to the end-users of the products. Web pages and therefore, the messages for consumers are designed by the software specialists whose training and experience is primarily technically oriented. On the other hand, the aesthetic appeal and ability to visualize the product from the end-users´ viewpoint is critically important. It is this latter type of organization that defines the underlying dialogue and model of the system. Present work analyzed the Web-pages in terms of typing contents, memory load, definition of structure, software design and CAD tools applications. The paper discusses a study of the Web-pages of three multinational companies (Proctor & Gamble, Nokia and Nestle) involved in consumer goods and evaluated their message contents from an ergonomic point of view. Results indicated that the Web page designs of the three global consumer item companies are statistically significantly different from each other. The analysis revealed that much remains to be done in these Web-pages to make them ´ergonomically fit´ for end-users. The paper concludes with the implications of its findings and puts forth the scope for further work.