I’ve always said “no” to breadcrumbs, but today I wanted to be sure that there was a good reason for this.� I did some searching and found an article about the usability of breadcrumbs.� My general sense is that while some people will use them, a solid navigation is more worth the effort.� I was curious what other people thought though.� Do you like having breadcrumbs on a site?� Have you designed a site with breadcrumbs?� Are breadcrumbs only for eating?� (I had to!)

I’m going to make an effort to write about 1 thing a week. I’m shooting for Thursdays, but as you can see this one is on Friday afternoon. I’m in a debate whether to keep it broad, go current events, or go just web stuff. What do you think?

This afternoon I spent a little bit of time reading an article about eye tracking tests for websites. Read this article and others on usability studies.� I haven’t read the entire thing yet, but it was interesting. They actually explain the process and show the data that they gather. It’s not only about where their eye falls, but also where it goes before it falls on the right thing. I was particularly interested to read that they recorded how long it took for the person’s eyes to fall on the right link or information.

At IP, we are just beginning a large redesign project and beginning with usability tests. While we can’t do an eye tracking tests (hardware is expensive), we are having individuals sit down with us and walk through some basic steps. This article made me realize that we should record the time it takes for them to complete the task. We must take all of this data with a grain of salt, but I believe there will be some interesting and hopefully helpful insights that we can learn from doing this.

If anyone has experience with this, please share!

I’m working on one of our websites here at work and want to get a complete printout of all of the files we have on the website by their filename (too many of them have the same page title to use that).� So I figure I can go into Dreamweaver, open up the site file list and go File > Print.� Only….there is no File > Print.� I tried googling it, but there aren’t even hits with those words in it.� So I’m thinking my only option is to do print screen 20 times in a row to get all the files I need.� That seems a little ridiculous though, so I’m open to suggestions!� Oh, I don’t have to use Dreamweaver to do this either, so if there are other apps that do this well, please let me know.

The ultimate goal is to find files (especially PDFs and Word docs) that are duplicates of each other but are not necesarily orphaned files.� Contribute is a big culprit in creating said dups when it does that filename.pdf, filename_000.pdf, etc.� Just an fyi for those that just switched to Contribute.

I was reading a post from Dave Shea about MIX06, which I’m not sure I fully understand what that is, but that’s ok for this discussion. It is quite obvious that IE7 was discussed a lot though. Everything is sounding really good, but don’t worry – I’m not jumping on the bandwagon like mahrens. Dave Shea did point out that Microsoft is slowly (oh sooo slowly) learning that “ease of use doesn’t outweigh safety.”

It reminded me of another issue that I seem to run into quite often though, “‘cool’ things do not outweigh usability.” By ‘cool’ things, I mean marquee tags, animated gifs, background music, everything that web developers hate. Yes for like 2 seconds these things were cool, but those 2 seconds were back in the 90s. It’s time to move on. I could blend this into design does not outweigh usability, but then I’ll ramble on about good design vs. bad design and Kirsten will fall asleep. You get what I mean anyway though.

As I have been adding more content to my website, I wanted more and more to have server side includes setup for my navigation bar on the right. So, tonight for some random reason I set it up. I can now add things to my navigation bar whenever I want and only have to add it once. Also, when my name changes (in 242 days, as I understand it), I can change my copyright notice just as easily. Perhaps I should change it now to be the current year…or I’m tired.