[thelist] Usability Ideas/Suggestions

Jonathan_A_McPherson at rl.gov Jonathan_A_McPherson at rl.gov
Wed Aug 14 11:10:01 CDT 2002


Burhan,

I'm a tree-based structure junkie. (-:

The easiest way to represent a tree of the type you are suggesting is (IMHO)
to use the datatypes of your server-side scripting language of choice to
build an actual tree and write a few functions to traverse it and get the
information you need. I've done this successfully with PHP.

It's my personal opinion that history trees aren't as helpful to users as
"breadcrumbs" or site hierarchy trees. I think that "recently viewed pages"
(a la Amazon.com) can be useful on larger sites, but I'm not sure what
benefit a tree of such pages would have.

--
Jonathan McPherson, LMIT/SD&I
Software Engineer & Web Systems Analyst
email / jonathan_a_mcpherson at rl dot gov


-----Original Message-----
From: Burhan [mailto:burhankhalid at members.evolt.org]
Sent: Wednesday, August 14, 2002 7:41 AM
To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
Subject: [thelist] Usability Ideas/Suggestions


Hello :

Recently I was thinking -- wouldn't it be nice to have a history display on
the page that displays hierarchy? Basically, a dynamically updating tree,
that tracks your path thru the site.

Here is what I'm thinking :

On Load, Tree is = [ Home ] (or Index, or whatever)
Say the user navigates to a page that is under the section thoughts.

Now, the tree would say =
[ Home ]
  [ Thoughts ]
    ..U R here...

Then, if the user were to go to another parent's child, it would display : [
Home ]
  [ Thoughts ]
  [ Parent ]
    ..U R here...

I have the logic figured out in my head. However, my problem is how would I
store the relative information? In a database? How would I link each link to
its parent? Has anyone ever done this? Any thoughts? At first I thought that
this is sorta like the breadcrumb approach. However, most users are
accustomed to a tree-like structure. So, I was thinking of creating a
history tree that updates as a user travels through a site would be a neat
idea.

Input is always appreciated.
--
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