I read Derek Pawazek’s article, Where Am I?, in A List Apart a few weeks ago and have been thinking about it ever since (another good ALA article, apparently). What I’ve been ruminating on are the three questions the article says all navigation should answer:
- Where Am I?
- Where Can I Go?
- Where Have I Been?
On the surface, the three questions seem to go together. They are all questions that a user will probably ask themselves after landing on a page (whether they realize they are asking them or not). They all start with the word ‘where,’ but I don’t think they are all about the navigation of a site.
The first two questions are about the site (what page am I on, what else is available on this site). The last one is about the user (what have I been doing).
As the designer of the site and the navigation, I’m qualified to tell the user about the site. The user is really the one who can answer that last question by using their browser history or the back button.
If they land on my page after a long session of surfing out on the web, it’s not my job to let them know where they’ve been. And I’m going to go out on a limb here and say it’s not my job to let them know where they’ve been in my site.
Take the metaphor of shopping in a store (Steve Krug in Don’t Make Me Think uses this metaphor): the site’s navigation is like the signs in a well laid out store. It tells you what section you’re in and where in that section you are. You don’t get a little dotted line that shows you where you’ve been (Ã la Family Circus).
Instead, my job is to make the navigation so easy to understand that users can glance up and think, oh, yeah, I’ve been to section 1 and 2, I’ll try 3.
But What About Breadcrumbs?
Actually, I like breadcrumbs for a large site, but I don’t like real breadcrumbs that show where I’ve been, I like the fake ones that show the structure of the site:
Home > Main Section > Sub Section > Sub-Sub Section.
This kind of breadcrumb helps answer questions 1 and 2, not question 3.
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