"Breadcrumb" Definition
on
July 2, 2008
"Breadcrumb" Definition
Website Redesign Glossary - Entry 5
Breadcrumb: An element on a web page (usually directly below the page title) showing the click path a user traveled to arrive at the current page. For example: Home > About Us > Our Staff Usually the terms are active links, which enable the user to retrace their click path (or skip back several clicks). Breadcrumbs, especially in deep sites with multiple levels of navigation, improve usability because they help users understand where they are now as well as the overall structure of the site, and navigate back to the pages they've visited.
The term "breadcrumb" comes from the trail Hansel and Gretel left to try to find their way back home.
Key issues to consider: What happens when a user takes a circuitous path to the current page (e.g. arrives there via an internal search as opposed to through the navigation structure) or arrives at an interior page from an external click? Is the breadcrumb always the same each time you arrive at a given page, or could it vary depending on your point of entry? How does the visual design incorporate the breadcrumb for maximum usability, and how does it work in conjunction with the page name?
Gregory Heller July 2, 2008
This is a really interesting "problem" that I have spoken with some folks about recently.
I think we have to stop thinking about them as "breadcrumbs" they do not actually show the path the user took, on most sites what they show is the hierarchy of navigation that the site designers thought up. In drupal, the breadcrumbs are set most often in the node template and include some reasonable path or categorization like "Home > About Us > Team" though the node you are on could have been reached from perhaps 5 different paths, or an internal or external search.
What these "breadcrumbs" really are these days are what Steve Krug refers to as "You are here indicators". And I think that is really how we should think of breadcrumbs. And breadcrumbs are not the only way, or even the best way to do it anymore. Think about tabs, or highlighted multi-tiered primary navigation.
I have faced this issue on a few projects recently, and we have handled it differently in each case, but often using active states of primary navigation. It seems to me that Drupal has not caught up yet and is still trying to solve the "Breadcrumb" problem, rather than looking at the "You are here indicator" solution.
I would like to see a solution that allows the implementor to manually configure a "you are here" path in panels, views and cck content types. These paths could use tokens (to add taxonomy terms, or user names or event dates into this path) and then themers could choose how to display these. This solution probably would not work for tabs or multi-tiered navigation, though Alex and Doug did some work on the nice menus module, ultimately creating the Nice Primary Menus module which partially addressed this issue.
