Grouping two audiences because they have some overlapping tasks

Question

Designing the navigation for a corporate website. We have decided to go with audience segmented navigation. One solution is to group "investors & media" due to the fact they would perform similar tasks. To me however, they are still different audiences and the majority of corporate sites I've seen have a separate 'media' section. Which makes me think we shouldn't group the two. Does two of the audience segments having similar tasks warrant grouping them in the navigation?

Answer 1

Investors and media are definitely different and shouldn't be clubbed together. Consider these points.

• As an investor, I would be keen to know financial aspects, the industry trends, forecast growth, competitive rating, brand performance, social footprint etc. Most of such content is technical and is meant to be precise and accurate. Audience of such data is business acumen and minds. Media on the other hand is interested in visuals, briefs and summaries and something which can attract ears and eyes.

• A media person can browse through Investor Section to dig something useful but an investor wouldn't be looking to browse media section to decide for an investment. Even if he visits those sections, he would expect media section to be politically accurate instead of factually actuate.

• To an organization, finding Investors and Finances is a rare opportunity as compared to media exposure. Grouping Investors and Media together would cost both types of users but costing more to investors interests than that of media people. This is something which any business wouldn't want.

• General impression of grouping Investors and Media together would be that organization is small in size, is short of data or it is not seeking investors seriously.

Answer 2

If the two groups have overlapping core-tasks I can imagine it's possible to do so, but in the example you gave us that's hardly the case. Force-grouping hardly-matching items mostly something that happens for reasons of limited screen space, but I don't think that's the case here as the supplied label still has both audiences listed. Also you can't really give the concatenated result "investors & media" a fitting label to cover both items I think.

So, my answer: no, it doesn't (in this case).