A breadcrumb or breadcrumb trail is a graphical control element used as a navigational aid in user interfaces and on web pages. It allows users to keep track and maintain awareness of their locations within programs, documents, or websites. The term alludes to the trail of bread crumbs left by Hansel and Gretel in the German fairy tale.
A breadcrumb trail tracks and displays each page viewed by a visitor of a website, either in the order the pages were viewed, [1] or in other definitions, displaying a hierarchy of the current page in relation to the website's structure. [2] Breadcrumbs are typically placed in horizontal form under the masthead or navigation of a website. [3]
They may be implemented with each part of the trail having a drop-down menu of its own, as well as drag and drop support, as done in Windows Explorer.
Breadcrumbs typically appear horizontally across the top of a Web page, often below title bars or headers. They provide links back to each previous page the user navigated through to get to the current page or—in hierarchical site structures—the parent pages of the current one. Breadcrumbs provide a trail for the user to follow back to the starting or entry point. [4] A greater-than sign (>) often serves as a hierarchy separator, although designers may use other glyphs (such as » or ›), as well as various graphical icons.
A breadcrumb trail or path based on viewing history is typically rendered as follows:
Page viewed > Page viewed > Page viewed > Page viewed > Page currently being viewed
For instance, in this scenario, a website visitor views seven pages (note how the pages are tracked in the order the user viewed them):
Home page > Services > About Us > Home page > Latest Newsletter > Home page > Page currently being viewed
Typical breadcrumbs following a hierarchical structure are shown as follows:
Home page > Section page > Subsection page
Current file managers including Linux Mint's Nemo, Windows Explorer (from Windows Vista onwards), Finder (for Macintosh operating systems), GNOME's Nautilus, KDE's Dolphin, Xfce's Thunar, MATE's Caja, and SnowBird allow breadcrumb navigation, often replacing or extending an address bar.[ citation needed ]
There are three types of web breadcrumbs: [5] [6]
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. For this reason, a tag may be more appropriate, though breadcrumbs can still be used to allow the user to retrace their steps and see how they arrived at the current page.
Some commentators and programmers alternatively use the term "cookie crumb" as a synonym to describe the navigation design. This is not the same thing as HTTP cookies (small pieces of data that websites leave on a visitor's machine that record data such as login information).
Michigan Community College's Virtual Learning Collaborative uses the term "Navigation Path", [7] as do some Drupal users. [8]
French and Spanish speakers sometimes use instead the term Ariadne's thread (in French fil d'Ariane) in relation to the thread left by Ariadne to Theseus so he can find the exit of the labyrinth after killing the Minotaur, on a LIFO (stack) instead of FIFO (queue) way. [9]
A file manager or file browser is a computer program that provides a user interface to manage files and folders. The most common operations performed on files or groups of files include creating, opening, renaming, copying, moving, deleting and searching for files, as well as modifying file attributes, properties and file permissions. Folders and files may be displayed in a hierarchical tree based on their directory structure.
Konqueror is a free and open-source web browser and file manager that provides web access and file-viewer functionality for file systems. It forms a core part of the KDE Software Compilation. Developed by volunteers, Konqueror can run on most Unix-like operating systems. The KDE community licenses and distributes Konqueror under GNU GPL-2.0-or-later.
The World Wide Web is an information system that enables content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond IT specialists and hobbyists. It allows documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet according to specific rules of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
A website is one or more web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Websites are typically dedicated to a particular topic or purpose, such as news, education, commerce, entertainment, or social media. Hyperlinking between web pages guides the navigation of the site, which often starts with a home page. The most-visited sites are Google, YouTube, and Facebook.
Drupal is a free and open-source web content management system (CMS) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. Drupal provides an open-source back-end framework for at least 14% of the top 10,000 websites worldwide and 1.2% of the top 10 million websites—ranging from personal blogs to corporate, political, and government sites. Drupal can also be used for knowledge management and for business collaboration.
Information architecture (IA) is the structural design of shared information environments; the art and science of organizing and labelling websites, intranets, online communities and software to support usability and findability; and an emerging community of practice focused on bringing principles of design, architecture and information science to the digital landscape. Typically, it involves a model or concept of information that is used and applied to activities which require explicit details of complex information systems. These activities include library systems and database development.
The toolbar, also called a bar or standard toolbar, is a graphical control element on which on-screen icons can be used. A toolbar often allows for quick access to functions that are commonly used in the program. Some examples of functions a toolbar might have are open file, save, and change font. Toolbars are usually distinguished from palettes by their integration into the edges of the screen or of other windows. This can result in wasted space if multiple underpopulated bars are stacked atop each other or interface inefficiency if overloaded bars are placed on small windows.
Banner blindness is a phenomenon in web usability where visitors to a website consciously or unconsciously ignore banner-like information. A broader term covering all forms of advertising is ad blindness, and the mass of banners that people ignore is called banner noise.
Breadcrumbs, also known as breading, consist of crumbled bread of varying dryness, sometimes with seasonings added, used for breading or crumbing foods, topping casseroles, stuffing poultry, thickening stews, adding inexpensive bulk to soups, meatloaves and similar foods, and making a crisp and crunchy covering for fried foods, especially breaded cutlets like tonkatsu and schnitzel. The Japanese variety of breadcrumbs is called "panko".
A navigation bar is a section of a graphical user interface intended to aid visitors in accessing information. Navigation bars are implemented in operating systems, file browsers, web browsers, apps, web sites and other similar user interfaces.
Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of web data to understand and optimize web usage. Web analytics is not just a process for measuring web traffic but can be used as a tool for business and market research and assess and improve website effectiveness. Web analytics applications can also help companies measure the results of traditional print or broadcast advertising campaigns. It can be used to estimate how traffic to a website changes after launching a new advertising campaign. Web analytics provides information about the number of visitors to a website and the number of page views, or creates user behaviour profiles. It helps gauge traffic and popularity trends, which is useful for market research.
Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic and also mobile app traffic and events, currently as a platform inside the Google Marketing Platform brand. Google launched the service in November 2005 after acquiring Urchin.
The mobile web comprises mobile browser-based World Wide Web services accessed from handheld mobile devices, such as smartphones or feature phones, through a mobile or other wireless network.
HTTP cookies are small blocks of data created by a web server while a user is browsing a website and placed on the user's computer or other device by the user's web browser. Cookies are placed on the device used to access a website, and more than one cookie may be placed on a user's device during a session.
In computing, a directory is a file system cataloging structure which contains references to other computer files, and possibly other directories. On many computers, directories are known as folders, or drawers, analogous to a workbench or the traditional office filing cabinet. The name derives from books like a telephone directory that lists the phone numbers of all the people living in a certain area.
A local shared object (LSO), commonly called a Flash cookie, is a piece of data that websites that use Adobe Flash may store on a user's computer. Local shared objects have been used by all versions of Flash Player since version 6.
Web tracking is the practice by which operators of websites and third parties collect, store and share information about visitors' activities on the World Wide Web. Analysis of a user's behaviour may be used to provide content that enables the operator to infer their preferences and may be of interest to various parties, such as advertisers. Web tracking can be part of visitor management.
A user journey is the experiences a person has when interacting with something, typically software. This idea is generally used by those involved with user experience design, web design, user-centered design, or anyone else focusing on how users interact with software experiences. It is often used as a shorthand for the overall user experience and set of actions that one can take in software or other virtual experiences.
Web navigation refers to the process of navigating a network of information resources in the World Wide Web, which is organized as hypertext or hypermedia. The user interface that is used to do so is called a web browser.
Social navigation is a form of social computing introduced by Paul Dourish and Matthew Chalmers in 1994, who defined it as when "movement from one item to another is provoked as an artifact of the activity of another or a group of others". According to later research in 2002, "social navigation exploits the knowledge and experience of peer users of information resources" to guide users in the information space, and that it is becoming more difficult to navigate and search efficiently with all the digital information available from the World Wide Web and other sources. Studying others' navigational trails and understanding their behavior can help improve one's own search strategy by guiding them to make more informed decisions based on the actions of others.
