i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Devin Coldewey of UX Magazine recently wrote a piece entitled "Making the URL Bar Useful Again", where he proposes a new metadata tag that would create a breadcrumb trail within a browser's URL bar based on the web page you are currently on. Instead of seeing a long, indecipherable URL address, this space would present users with enhanced information on where they are within the navigation structure of the web site.

I was thinking about the advantage of such a design recently when I started using Windows 7, and was pleased to find a similar breadcrumb system built into the address bar for the explorer window.  This new design allows you see the directory structure leading up to the folder you are currently in, and it lets you to quickly open up and look through any of the parent folders that lead you to your current location.  For me, this is much more useful than just seeing the traditional directory address of "C:\Users\Kari\Documents\___iSchool\01_FALL 2010."

In a similar fashion, the metadata "trail" that Coldewey proposes would aid the user in placing themselves within the context of a site's navigation scheme, rather than simply showing them the often meaningless URL address where that page is located. As Coldewey points out, if I am shopping for a specific item on Amazon I am better served by knowing what product category I am currently within, and whether or not I am signed into the site, rather than seeing the seemingly endless URL and product ID that makes up the Amazon URL address for that page.  We spend much of our daily lives peering past the "frame" that is the browser--yet we have not seen the sort of radical changes that we might expect in making this real estate more valuable to our online experience.  Maybe it's time to adapt conventions that would enable this "frame" to be more dynamic and more relevant to the content contained therein.