[Sigia-l] Breadcrumbs - case study

[George Olsen]

Listera said:
> breadcrumbs as the actual path taken to a specific page vs. a page's
> classification within the site hierarchy

That's essentially my key compliant -- the metaphor doesn't work, and
consequently I've found it occasionally confuses laypeople.

BTW, I don't mind professional jargon among professionals. As was pointed
out, it's both useful and inevitable. (I use plenty of it when I'm
sailing.) I just don't like jargon when it gets in the way of
communicating to outsiders.

For a user-centered set of professions we seem to all too often forget
about UCD in communicating with clients and colleagues, using a variety of
jargon ("affords" when we could just as easily say "enables"), or using
terms stretched to mean something pretty different to how the average
person would understand the term -- such as (at the risk of starting
another semantics flamefest), when "usability" is used to refer to the
whole of user experience.

I think part of the confusing jargon comes because we're in a convergent
set of fields, and inherit/reapply terms from elsewhere. This convergence
is one reason there's so much disagreement over first principles. Remember
it took decades, if not centuries, for most fields to do.

So we've got a way to go, even if the repeated first principle debates on
SIG-IA feel like they've been going on for centuries. <g>