This is something I happen to know quite a bit about, being that it's
been a primary focus of our for the last 12 years.
On Mar 3, 2009, at 11:23 AM, sreeramen ramaswamy wrote:
however there are discussion about merits of breadcrumbs. Usability
tests have revealed that breadcrumbs are not observed by novice users.
while once a user becomes aware of them then it helps in navigating
back and forward efficiently.
This statement isn't really accurate. Longitudinal studies repeatedly
show that infrequent users (which are often mistakenly referred to as
"novice" even though "novice" really reflects expertise in the domain)
rarely change their navigation behaviors through repeated use of the
site. They keep interacting with the site as though its their first
time, regardless of number of visits.
Frequent users (users who regularly visit sites more than once in a 48
hour period -- think a site like Basecamp or GMail) do adopt more
efficient behaviors, but only on those sites where the efficient
behaviors are not designed into the default behaviors. I'd argue that
on a well-designed site, the initial behaviors would be the most
efficient, thus rendering the difference between so-called novice and
expert use irrelevant.
Inotherwords, make it a good design from the start and you don't have
to worry about this.
given the users have become lazy due to evolution in search the whole
idea of browsing through a site is gone for a toss.
There is no evidence to support that any behavioral changes in people
have occurred because of the prevalence of search engines. In 12
years, the basic behavior patterns have remained identical.
the issues that
need consideration would be are all your pages read by the search
engine. what happens if a user comes to the page using google/yahoo
search...what path are you going to show in the bread crumbs.
Breadcrumbs would be little help to search engines. The crawlers
traverse the site hierarchically and, therefore, the breadcrumb links
would be pages they'd already visited.
A well-designed site, both from a usability and an SEO perspective,
will offer clear links to the critical pages. A well-designed site for
users will automatically have great optimization for search.
if you
are using ajax you need to be careful that a page may not be indexed
by the search engines.
Again, I feel this is an inaccurate statement. Well-designed ajax
implementations use progressive enhancement (http://www.uie.com/articles/hijax/
) which will optimize just fine.
Hope this clears up some confusion.
Jared
Jared M. Spool
User Interface Engineering
510 Turnpike St., Suite 102, North Andover, MA 01845
e: [email protected] p: +1 978 327 5561
http://uie.com Blog: http://uie.com/brainsparks Twitter: jmspool
UIE Web App Summit, 4/19-4/22: http://webappsummit.com
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