David Scotson

I adde some pointers on usability to a wiki page on usability if anyone else wants to contribute their suggested books and resources.

I can see from your example that you take my point that the breadcrumb forces a hierarchy, so going back to the original example, of a student reading a resource about porcupines and wanting to see other material on the same subject we have at least three potential situations:

• they get no link between the course front page and the current activity
• they get a link to other activities of the same technical type (current situation).
• they get a link to the subsection of the front page (or a new page with only that section) showing other items in that topic/section/week

This last option is somewhat different from seeing a list of related information by subject as originally suggested in the porcupine example, and has the further problem that it links to either a part of a page (with the full page also linked in the navigation bar next to it) or the need for a new page that duplicates the relevant part of the main course page.

I want to be explicit that I understand the motivation for this and the thinking behind it, and am certainly not dismissing it out of hand, I just think that replacing, rather than removing, the activity link is a lot more involved than has been suggested and needs thought about how the hierarchy would be constructed.

Sorry Samuli, I know I've hijacked your thread, but I think there are multiple problems and complaints surrounding the navigation bar. I'm just trying to get some clarity so that people can be talking constructively on the same terms, even if they disagree on the best way forward.

The idea of linking related content is a good one, but not one that fits well into a hierarchy.

To continue your example, if you had documents that dealt with porcupines and butterflies and refrigerators, but some documents dealt with all of them and some dealt with only a subset, how would you categorise them in a simple hierarchy?

This need better fits the idea of metadata tagging which is common in weblog software. Their basic hierarchy is based on a calendar, but each post can be associated with multiple tags (similar to the categories in Moodle's Glossary) that allow you to browse by related topics. (This is also sounding dangerously close to some of the plans for a Bug Forum that allows classification)

It also allows (if your content is open to the public) the building of folksonomies that might be handy for the course exchange function.

This also touches on another point I meant to raise. I think one reason for Moodle seeming such a breath of fresh air is that the Course Management System competitors were so stagnant. I've often thought that Moodle should be looking to much more vibrant Content Management System field (particularly open source ones) to find its real peers and inspiration in terms of usability and features, though obviously not as far as pedagogy goes (not that the big Course Management Systems seem very good in that department either).

Note that if the interpretation of the breadcrumb metaphor that is the root of the problem then there are two possible solutions: stop using the metaphor, or change things to match the common interpretation.

It appears Martin has already made the first decision, though it seems that he never used the term himself anyway. It's a simple step that I support even though I have always heard, and used, the term breadcrumb trail, though in a slightly less literal manner, generally thinking of it as a way to get home when lost, rather than a trail to retraced step by step.

Ironically of course, Hansel and Gretel were let down by the original breadcrumb trail, which turned out to be useless because the birds ate it, leaving them stranded in the forest.