David Scotson

http://www.quirksmode.org/

That's the only site I've even seen that actually tracks where you have visited. Seemed like geeky showing off to me.

I also second the conclusion found in this article as long as you bear in mind that it is mostly talking specifically about public websites, with transitory visitors, rather than web applications like Moodle so all it's conclusions need to be shifted slightly.

brief summary

• breadcrumb trails (in the Moodle sense) are highly efficient
• 'normal' people generally don't use them, unless 'trained' ('training' in this context meaning pretty much anything beyond simply finding a site you've never seen before through Google)

key quote

"Specifically, they argue that training makes sense in Intranet environments, where the ROI for the training would be more than offset by increased productivity."

My usability research suggest you shouldn't use blue underlined words in web text unless you are playing a pratical joke

Speaking as someone typing with a Dvorak keyboard , I really think the breadcrumb trail as you envision it would be far less useful. I can't see it being changed in any radical way soon simply because it would be a lot of effort but this article on breadcrumb trails has some relevant information on the topic if anyone does want to weigh up the merits of changing.

Despite the origin of breadcrumb trail metaphor, most (all?) breadcrumb trails actually represent the hierarchy of the site, rather than the path you took to get to the current page. It is, for example, perfectly possible to enter a forum discussion directly from an email (as I have just done) or a variety of other paths.

In this context then, the forum (i.e. current activity type) entry in the breadcrumb trail makes perfect sense (to me at least, though I'm a programmer/webdeveloper, and the tone of some of the discussions recently leads me to think that I therefore am disqualified from having an opinion on usability issues).

Using the week or topic name would also make sense, though using both would possibly be confusing, and of course topics don't actually have a name (though occasionally the starting text from the into label type thing is grabbed and used).

No! Another minor annoyance bites the dust for 1.5 (I should really have checked first before posting). Call me a sad geek, but it's changes/fixes like that (and the 'boring' restructuring work you mentioned in another thread) that makes me excited about the next version of Moodle.