Nielsen Norman GroupEvidence-Based User Experience Research, Training, and Consulting
In a miniature information architecture, coverage of a single topic is chunked into units that are connected through simple navigation.
Ordinal sequences, logical structuring, time lines, or prioritization by importance or frequency are usually better than A-Z listings for presenting options to users.
It's easy to bias study participants, whether in user testing or in card sorting, if they focus on matching stimulus words instead of working on the underlying problem.
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.
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.
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 you should still use three times more participants than you would in traditional usability tests.
This paper presents the methods used to design the user interface and overall structure of Sun Microsystems' first intranet. Sun had an extensive set of information available on the WWW with the home page as the access point, but also wanted to provide employees access to internal information that could not be made available to the Internet at large.