Breadcrumbs

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.

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.

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:

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.