Ordinal sequences, logical structuring, time lines, or prioritization by importance or frequency are usually better than A-Z listings for presenting options to users.
Individual investors are intimidated by overly complex IR sites and need simple summaries of financial data. Both individual and professional investors want the company's own story and investment vision.
Structure and navigation must support each other and integrate with search and across subsites. Complexity, inconsistency, hidden options, and clumsy UI mechanics prevent users from finding what they need.
Task success is up substantially compared with usability statistics from 2004. Bad information architecture causes most of the remaining user failures.
Appleland is becoming progressively flatter and, at the same time, less usable. Properly-designed interfaces scale, so that they support the new user as well as the expert.
New user testing of site maps shows that they are still useful as a secondary navigation aide, and that they're much easier to use than they were during our research 7 years ago.
In analyzing 56 intranets, we found many common top-level categories, labels, and navigation designs, but ultimately, the diversity was too great to recommend a single IA.
When your website's users consistently go to the wrong sections, you have many options for getting users back on track, from better labels to clearer structure.
Users will often overlook the actual location of information or products if another website area seems like the perfect place to look. Cross-references and clear labels alleviate this problem.
Testing ever-more users in card sorting has diminishing returns, but test at least 15 users -- 3 times more than you would in traditional usability tests.
Jakob Nielsen's foreword to Rosenfeld and Morville's book on Web Information Architecture (second edition). Your users will get lost unless you follow their advice.
Subsites can be used in hierarchical information spaces to give particular prominence to a certain level of the hierarchy which is used as the subsite designator.