DM Ref: BreadCrumbs

Hey All…

So I’ve been a bit busy, but I did not forget this project in progress. =) I did get a chance to touch base with my buddy running our D&D game, or as titles go I spoke with my Dungeon Master. I mentioned my workshopping a possible app for our game that we could use. He started to name drop a lot of things he’s using to bring the game together. I started to see how much work goes into bringing together a game session.

While my app is very bare so far, I did get some great ideas of possible functions we could bring in that would make sense and maybe centralize his work and allow the players a core source for reference.

I started to show off a bit in terms of bootstrap and some of the things I could bring visually. Then he asked me, what are breadcrumbs?

I’m not a huge design person based on my current exposure so this was new question. Now if you hear breadcrumbs, if your mind works like mine, you start to think Hansel and Gretel or maybe chicken parm. Again, random associations are my thing haha.

The use of the name breadcrumbs is can be attributed to the classic fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm. They also are a way to follow your path in the forest of a website. These breadcrumbs appear as hyperlinks aka links.

So why breadcrumbs? Well, breadcrumbs are not useful in single page applications but have great uses in larger scale sites. Typically, the reside in a horizontal line and provide users an idea of where they are in terms of your site. As an example, in this unnamed popular electronics website ;)

In the top let corner, you can see I’ve travelled from Home to Office Solutions to Monitors then LCD/LED monitors. Of course, If I’ve travelled too far, I can click on any of the links previous to LCD/LED monitors look at those more expanded pages. This type of link navigation also reduces the amount of clicks.

While excitingly looking this up, and explaining it to my friend, something did hit me. While I have seen this feature, why don’t all site implement this. For starters, this feature can be additional but should generally be more of a “if needed” feature. There is plenty to consider when you are building a site and you don’t want to overload the visual aspects of your site.

Not quite sure, if I will use this breadcrumbs just yet but something worth thinking about as I retool my current vision after the feedback session with my friend. I will say there are plenty of variations and expansions, but let’s see how this evolves with my next update on this project in motion.

Till next time