Nested: Extended Breadcrumb
- XWiki
- Design
- Completed
Ecaterina Moraru (Valica)- [Iteration][UX] Extended Breadcrumb http://markmail.org/thread/rab6vbxd6743gmrc (May 22, 2015)
- Macaw Skin (May 2015)
- Nested: Tree Location (Jul 2015)
- Nested: Navigation and Actions (Jun 2015)
Description
Extended-Breadcrumb's purpose is to provide a solution to combine the global-menu functionality with the current breadcrumb functionality, while supporting nested spaces concept and being backwards compatible with parent/child relationship.
Proposal
Current
Purpose
- Represent the following hierarchy: Europe - Eastern Europe - Romania - Moldavia
- Southern Bucovina - Suceava - Vatra Dornei
- Combine global-menu functionality (actions) with the breadcrumbs (navigation)
- This is an usage example. There are other possibilities to achieve this kind of hierarchy (in the main wiki, only with space, only with pages, etc.)
Entity Icons
| Combined functionality | Increased complexity |
| Clear entity type displayed | Display is crowded by the icon usage, making it harder to read the label, thus slowing navigation |
| User can anticipate the available actions for a specific type | If the available actions are identical, the type doesn't offer any additional hint |
| Don't display entity icons |
Home Icon
Being one of a kind (only one main wiki) can be represented in a special manner. Also it should be outside of the hierarchy (since its purpose is navigational), thus does not need a label. | Currently, at sub-wiki level we don't display the main-wiki link for breadcrumbs (but only in the global-menu). We should display the main-wiki link also in the extended-breadcrumb (except for the 'farm' case). With this change we should also change the logo behavior, by redirecting to main-wiki, instead of sub-wiki homepage (or make this customizable since there are cases when we might want isolated sub-wikis). |
| Display home icon |
Entity Actions
Easy access to entity actions | Crowding the display. Alternative is to display the actions in content-menu |
| Consistent actions across entities | Hard to differentiate between entity types in the absence of entity icons: - Different actions per type will produce confusion; - If the actions are symmetric than they can be displayed somewhere else (content-menu) |
| Don't display entity actions, rely on content-menu (see MacawSkin) |
Limit items
Limit by type
| Similar to current display mode of global-menu | Not backwards compatible with parent/child relation |
| Compatible with display of entity actions since there is a limited number of entries and the type is displayed | Limited navigation because of displaying only 3 entries |
Limit by count
| More inclusive navigation | Hard to know which is the more relevant navigation (left part, right part, symmetric) since this depends on the user's structure |
| Limit the displayed items depending on the breadcrumbs container's width |
Expand
Linear expansion
| Familiar breadcrumb interaction | Container needs to be able to expand horizontally and vertically when items are expanded |
Tree expansion
| Useful for complex hierarchy structures (5+ items) | Might be an overkill for simple structures, since the linear display could suffice. Also the tree duplicates the breadcrumb functionality. The advantage of using a tree would be if we add additional functionality inside the tree displayer, but this increases complexity. |
Conclusion
- Combining the global-menu and breadcrumb functionality increases the navigation complexity.
Currently we have difficulties in understanding the differences between the location hierarchy vs. parent hierarchy.
When we will combine them, providing different actions for items depending on the item's type will be very confusing for the user, since different users will use different types of entities (wikis.webhome, spaces.webhome, pages) to achieve the same hierarchy
- The recommendation is to keep separate the navigation (breadcrumb) from entity type actions (menus).
Usage Examples
