[Sigia-l] Breadcrumbs - case study (maybe OT)

[Christopher Fahey [askrom]]

> > For me, Amazon does this better with it's book 
> > suggestions than breadcrumbs as these are 
> > far more focussed.
> 
> i would say that the book suggestions are probably 
> more to do with the collective navigation/purchasing 
> patterns of users, rather than any sort of direct 
> classification, but I agree for sure that it is a more 
> valuable navigation tool in this case anyway.

My 2cents on breadcrumbs:

1) It's important to note that breadcrumbs are really only useful for
sites where the pages or the content lends itself very well to
hierarchical systems that are both *strict* (no 'virtual paths' - no
page can be conceptually located in more than one place), and that
extend from *top-to-bottom* (the hierarchy goes all the way from the
root [home page] to the leaves [articles, products, etc], with no
alternate organizational system inbetween). If there is any question
that the "leaf-level" items in your hierarchy (for example, book item
pages at Amazon.com) might be found under more than one hierarchical
category (for example, a biography of Churchill might be found under
"biographies", "history", etc), then perhaps a top-to-bottom hierarchy,
and thus breadcrumbs, are not appropriate. 

In other words, the degree to which breadcrumbs are appropriate for a
site is the same as the degree to which a hierarchy is appropriate to
the site. Hierarchies and breadcrumbs are two aspects of the same thing.

2) A corrolary to this is that the user's perception of the hierarchy,
and their preconceptions (mental model) of what that hierarchy is, is
also important to understand, agree on, and document in great detail
before implementing a breadcrumb design. The hierarchy and breadcrumbs
should be completely unambiguous. An example I always give of an
appropriate use of breadcrumbs, one that maps to common user
preconceptions of a hierarchy and one that is readily suited to placing
leaves in exclusive, unique locations, is a basic newspaper web site
where breadcrumbs might look like this: 
     Home>Sports>Baseball>National League
The usage model for a hierarchical/breadcrumb system is one where users
are likely to want to go to a single node/branch in the hierarchy and
peruse a variety of content within that node and that node alone. An
example is a person who opens the newspaper to the sports section and
reads everything in there, not caring about the business or
international news sections. The sports main page is their "hub" every
day they read the paper.

3) Hyperlinked breadcrumbing assumes that each node of the hierarchy has
a "home" or "hub", or "directory" page which should allow the user to
find other pages in that section. If you click on one of the links in
the breadcrumb string (unintentional mixed metaphor), you have to go
somewhere! I like to say that breadcrumbs should only be used if there
is a genuine user need to "jump up" a level or two to see a directory of
more content like the page they were looking at. In the Amazon example
quoted above, the goal is the same (find similar books) but the
cognitive model is different (unless you are a librarian, books don't
fall into a single, universally-recognized hierarchy), hence I agree
that a hierarchy within Amazon's book section is probably not
appropriate, and thus neither are breadcrumbs.

-Cf

[christopher eli fahey]
art: http://www.graphpaper.com
sci: http://www.askrom.com
biz: http://www.behaviordesign.com