[Sigia-l] Breadcrumbs - case study

[Livia Labate]

Following the suggestion to take some real examples and
make our discussions a bit less abstract, here is one:

> Frank Siraguso:
: it is possible to write code to dynamically show the
: actual path taken to a given page.

True, it is possible, but a couple of years ago I participated in a project
with lots of technical and budgetary constraints where breadcrumbs made me
insane. It was a retail shop for kids clothes in Australia called Jumping
Jack Flash: http://www.jumpingjackflash.com.au

The breadcrumbs were automatically generated for product pages through the
product templates. The problem is, some products were classified under
several
categories and the breadcrumbs could only show one thing.

Home > Products > Accessories > RATTLE
Home > Products > Babies > RATTLE
Home > Products > Gifts > RATTLE

The technical solution was to enter the breadcrumbs that corresponded to the
first category the product was listed in. (RATTLE was in Accessories, Babies
and Gifts, but when it was added to the database, Gifts was included first,
so the breadcrumb stuck with it).

The Problem:

The user who decided to browse Accessories and click on RATTLE, was taken to
the rattle page, where breadcrumbs said :

Home > Products > Gifts > RATTLE

More than this, the product template displayed a graphic on the left with
the category title (with the local navigation for sub-categories). This
graphic reflected the same category the breadcrumbs used. So in this
example, the user would see the 'wrong' breadcrumbs and 'wrong' graphics.

I changed jobs and did not know what had come of it, but visiting the site
now, I see that they have done nothing about it. The users must get REALLY
confused.

Livia Labate
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www.livlab.com | liv at livlab.com