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Define breadcrumbs1/12/2024 Information-seeking is becoming a machine-human dance. Now that AI is rapidly becoming a part of our industry, there are several crucial factors that need our careful consideration. If there was more preservation, you could appreciate where your logic or curiosity evolved at different points. But there, you miss seeing how your search terms evolve and thus your thinking about a topic. Say you’re conducting academic research, most of the time the only thing you can do to emulate your path being preserved is to open new tabs from thing to thing. Make sure that you think this through in terms of the user journey, what people are doing and of course, the amount of context that’s useful to maintain. In the second example, we exclude the first 3 layers, and focus on the context from the starting point of “Active clients”.Ĭonsidering the origin of your breadcrumbs is always important, but is especially important when the hierarchy of your paths is quite deep.įiguring out the right origin for the situation takes special consideration. Within the top header and the left hand navigation, these places state the location of “where you are” in themselves, and are a glance away (look at the left hand side navigation). The first example doesn’t take the whole layout into consideration and thus creates redundancy in what’s shown. In the example above, we see the difference in how the structure is represented especially at different “origins”, in the first example, we have a literal interpretation of location breadcrumbs, which creates the potential for a lot of redundancy. This calls into question your overall navigation and breadcrumbs come along for the ride. They may even switch back and forth between them. Take the example of a software suite – on one hand, you may say “oh! Home” that’s where we start, in reality, from the home screen where people launch, they may go to product A, B or C. It may sound like a simple question, but it’s a little more complicated than that, as it always is in the software world. Where should your breadcrumb start?Īn important part of the breadcrumbs conversation, when you’re depicting a hierarchy, is zeroing in on where to start. We suggest reviewing documentation, reading up on databases and drawing or mapping out your data. You’ll have to collaborate with a data architect, back-end developer, or even a data analyst/scientist type of person to fully understand how things are put together in your product. Understanding data is a key enterprise UX skill, and is essential for designing other interactions in your software like data tables and data dashboards, so face the music and get your hands dirty. We can say with confidence that you cannot design a halfway decent breadcrumb experience without deeply understanding your data. This is the scrappy, collaborative and downright nerdy part of the equation. This is the part they don’t mention very often on double diamond design frameworks□. To make good design decisions about breadcrumbs, regardless of the type of breadcrumb you have, requires a robust understanding of your data. So, if breadcrumbs aren’t simply depictions of the data architecture of your product, then how can breadcrumbs be structured? What are the types of breadcrumbs overall?īreadcrumbs and data structure Get to know the data ( Sorry, we’ve got this edgy take Norman, but we think you’ll understand. In brief, digital experiences are wildly varied and complex, so losing context or ‘history’ may block us from delivering a great experience. Sustaining context in various ways gets super important because users are expending a lot of brainpower already and the stakes may be very high– any opportunities to keep this context can be very beneficial to users. When the user experience is tailored towards efficiency and productivity like it is in enterprise UX, preserving the user’s sense of place and understanding of the current state is paramount. However, use cases within our enterprise software are typically more complex and optimized for performance and task completion which means that some of the strict guidelines suggested by NN Group may need to be expanded upon. If we were talking strictly about casual website browsing, maintaining context about the user’s exact path would rightly be banned – as it is in NN Group’s article. may involve contextual representations of path and/or state Breadcrumbs which are generated dynamically – i.e. where stuff ‘is’ in a hierarchy of the product itself or the data structure itself Breadcrumbs which reflect data architecture – i.e.
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