[Sigia-l] breadcrumbs with added spice?

[Eric Scheid]

On 29/10/07 10:06 AM, "Juan Ruiz" <Juan.Ruiz at hyro.com> wrote:

> From my research, not many sites have taken this approach. By having a
> fly-out menu on each breadcrumb, we are kind of creating another
> navigation menu, rather than keeping the breadcrumb as a mere navigation
> aid. It competes against the top or left hand navigation. Thoughts?

It really is only viable if you have a dense multi-layered hierarchical
structure of information, such that it would be impractical to list the
layers in the main navigation due to changing context.

I notice too that the wowhead.com example goes against one of the
recommendations of bread crumb design in that the last crumb is also linked.
Looking more closely at the world66.com design though reveals an interesting
difference: each crumb there presents a flyout menu of sub-ordinate options,
while the wowhead.com example presents a flyout menu of sibling
alternatives. This is why the world66.com example doesn't have a flyout menu
on the final crumb of a leaf-node page (which stymied me briefly,
particularly when I noticed that the Tokyo page did have a flyout on it's
final crumb).

I can't help thinking that the wowhead approach, where crumb-level
alternatives are listed, is superior to the world66 approach (where
sub-ordinate options are listed). Selecting an alternative at any crumb node
changes *that* crumb, a direct action:response model.

e.