Breadcrumb (navigation)

Breadcrumbs or breadcrumb trail are a navigation technique used in user interfaces. Its purpose is to give users a way to keep track of their location within programs or documents. The term is taken from the trail of breadcrumbs left by Hansel and Gretel in the popular fairytale.

Websites

Breadcrumbs typically appear horizontally across the top of a webpage, usually below any title bars or headers. They provide links back to each previous page that the user navigated through in order to get to the current page, for hierarchical structures usually the parent pages of the current one. Breadcrumbs provide a trail for the user to follow back to the starting/entry point of a website. Generally, an arrow is used as hierarchy separator, although other glyphs can be used to represent this.

They may look something like this:

Home page → Section page → Subsection page

There are three types of web breadcrumbs:

Path

Path breadcrumbs are dynamic and show the path that the user has taken to arrive at a page.

Location

Location breadcrumbs are static and show where the page is located in the website hierarchy.

Attribute

Attribute breadcrumbs give information that categorizes the current page.

Usability

Some commentators [ [http://www.useit.com/alertbox/breadcrumbs.html Breadcrumb navigation increasingly useful] ] criticize Path-style breadcrumbs because they duplicate functionality that properly subsists in the browser; namely, the 'Back' button and browsing history.

Location breadcrumbs are not necessarily appropriate for sites whose content is so rich that single categories do not fully describe a particular piece of content. This is a common situation in sites employing a search-base navigation paradigm (for example, Amazon). In general, wherever a strict hierarchy is not applicable, Location breadcrumbs are inappropriate.

Cookie crumb

Some commentators and programmers alternatively use the term "cookie crumb" (or some variant) as a synonym to describe the previously mentioned navigation technique, but this usage is considered incorrect and most likely represents a linguistic corruption of the original "breadcrumb" metaphor. This misuse is further problematic because "cookie crumb" is often used to describe a datum or parameter inside an HTTP cookie file; another technology used on the web that is nonetheless distinct from the navigational method.see e.g., Managing Windows With Vbscript and Wmi By Don Jones Published 2004 Addison-Wesley Professional ISBN 0321213343]

Global Positioning System (GPS)

Advanced GPS tools may keep track of the motion of a GPS device bearer by recording the positions of the traveller at specified time moments and presenting them at a GPS display as a "breadcrumb trail" of position markers.

Notes

External links

* [http://www.webdesignpractices.com/navigation/breadcrumb.html "Breadcrumb Navigation" - Statistics] by Heidi Adkisson, 2002.
* [http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/52/breadcrumb.htm "Breadcrumb Navigation: Further Investigation of Usage"] by Bonnie Lida Rogers and Barbara Chaparro, 2003
* [http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/61/breadcrumb.htm "Influence of Training and Exposure on the Usage of Breadcrumb Navigation"] by Spring S. Hull, 2004
* [http://user-experience.org/uefiles/breadcrumbs/ "Location, Path & Attribute Breadcrumbs"] by Keith Instone
* [http://hdl.handle.net/1901/433 "Breadcrumb Navigation Deployment in Retail Web Sites"] by Sean Aery, 2007