Breadcrumb (navigation)

"Breadcrumb trail" redirects here. For the album by The Frames, see Breadcrumb Trail.

File:Breadcrumb navigation in Nautilus.png

GNOME Files, demonstrating its implementation of location-based breadcrumb navigation.

File:Dolphin barra indirizzi.png

Breadcrumb in Dolphin file manager.

Breadcrumbs or breadcrumb trails are a graphical control element used as a navigational aid in user interfaces. It allows users to keep track of their locations within programs, documents or websites. The term comes from the trail of bread crumbs left by Hansel and Gretel in the eponymous fairytale.

Usage

Websites

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. A greater-than sign (>) often serves as hierarchy separator, although designers may use other glyphs (such as » or ›), as well as various graphical treatments.

Typical breadcrumbs look like this:

Home page > Section page > Subsection page

or

Home page : Section page : Subsection page

or

home page : section page 1 : section page 2

Software

Current file managers including Windows Explorer (from Windows Vista onwards), Mac OS's Finder, GNOME's Nautilus, KDE's Dolphin, Xfce's Thunar, MATE's Caja, and SnowBird allow breadcrumb navigation, often replacing or extending an address bar.

Types

There are two types of Web breadcrumbs:

• 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

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.

Other names

Some commentators and programmers alternatively use the term "cookie crumb" as a synonym to describe the navigation design.
This should not be confused with the term cookie, which refers to HTTP cookies (text files websites write on a visitor's machine that record data such as login information).

Michigan Community College's Virtual Learning Collaborative uses the term "Navigation Path", as do some Drupal users.

External links

• Breadcrumb Navigation: Further Investigation of Usage by Bonnie Lida Rogers and Barbara Chaparro, 2003
• Influence of Training and Exposure on the Usage of Breadcrumb Navigation by Spring S. Hull, 2004