Keith Instone

I do not regularly read Alertbox any more, but this one was too good to pass up.

• Breadcrumb Navigation Increasingly Useful

People often think that when I defined different types of breadcrumbs that I automatically thought "path breadcrumbs" were a good idea or that I was advocating that breadcrumbs as a whole were mandatory. Not so - I simply wanted to define the various types so that information architects (and others) could talk about breadcrumbs intelligently.

Jakob, of course, goes farther, saying location breadcrumbs are the way to go and they are worth doing.

Jared Spool offers his opinion on the value of breadcrumbs, referencing my breadcrumb analysis.

I would have to agree with Jared that breadcrumbs are most useful to tell users "where they are" - location breadcrumbs - when they "teleport" to a deep page within a site.

For example, this page on Star Trek teleporting has a breadcrumb that makes it pretty easy to see where I am within the sciforums site. For this BBC article on teleporting without a breadcrumb, it is harder to tell at first glance if this article is actually "science" or "tv".

The jury is still out on attribute breadrumbs. In database-driven sites, there often is not 1 "true" location for a piece of content. What I call "attribute breadcrumbs" - a list of locations for a given object - might help out here. For example, the attribute breadcrumbs for this book on teleportation tell me at a glance that this book is more about spirituality than science. In a real bookstore, there is 1 place on the shelf - attribute breadcrumbs show all of the locations the book may have been placed. We need some research here to see if/when these breadcrumbs help.

There does not appear to be as much value for path breadcrumbs on sites. The browser does an acceptable, but not perfect, job of keeping track of a user's path.

Anyway, designing a page that stands alone and does not require the user to start at your site home page has always been wise. Breadrcumbs are one tool at your disposal for this.

I am the third author, with James Blustein and his student Ishtiaq Ahmed, on a short paper that was accepted for Hypertext 05 (Austria, September).

"An Evaluation of Menu Breadcrumbs for the WWW" reports on an experiment with an advanced type of breadcrumb.

I contributed with the background research, advising and a small bit of writing - the real work was done at Dalhousie.

I will not be able to go to the conference. The last Hypertext conference I attended was 2000 in San Antonio - and that was only to present a tutorial. I honestly cannot recall which one was the last one I attended in full, but I went to several in the mid-90s.

The proceedings are always interesting to read - I will have to recap some of my favorites someday.

At the 2002 IA Summit, I proposed a research agenda (a series of questions, actually) for breadcrumbs. Some of the research is starting to roll in. Links that address this research agenda:

• Exploring User Mental Models of Location, Path, and Attribute Breadcrumbs in Web Navigation, Colter, Summers & Smith, University of Baltimore.
• Breadcrumb Navigation: Further Investigation of Usage, Rogers & Chaparro, Wichita State.
• Breadcrumb Navigation: An Exploratory Study of Usage, Lida, Hulll & Pilcher, Wichita State.
• Datos sobre uso y efectividad de breadcrumbs, Eduardo Manchon (in Spanish)
• Methods and Models of Navigation in Hypertextual Space, Jamie Blustein, Dalhousie University

The first published use of the term "bread crumb" for online navigation was in 1987 by Mark Bernstein. One early reference is The bookmark and the compass: orientation tools for hypertext users, SIGOIS Bulletin, 1988.

Attached are 2 files that I created in 2002-2003 about Location, Path & Attribute Breadcrumbs. This work on breadcrumbs was first presented as a poster at the 3rd Annual Information Architecture Summit, March 16-17, 2002.

Three Breadcrumbs Overview (280K, April 1, 2003 version) - 1-page example for each type of breadcrumb: Yahoo! for Location, Eddie Bauer for Path, Amazon for Attribute.

IA Summit Poster (550K, March 30, 2002 version) - A single PDF that includes the overview, the poster contents, and comments from attendees.