Provide context in deeper levels of the navigation tree

With the increasing depth of the navigation, it’s easy to get lost, not knowing where one is. For example, it’s unclear on the below screenshot which group the task belongs to.

Screenshot_from_2023-04-12_23-19-18

There should be some context. Ideas:

  • Above the data table specific to the current page (task data in this example), provide some basic data about upper levels (e.g. course name or code and group code in this example). This provides more context, but this also means more planning to decide exactly what data to include, and it can get unwieldy if there is a very large number of levels.
  • Provide breadcrumbs. A breadcrumb can contain less information, but it’s more scalable when there are many levels, and it can be a link, so one can walk up the menu structure (currently, there’s usually only a link to the top level, going back to intermediate levels requires going back to the top level and then navigating down again).
  • …

My personal favorite is the breadcrumbs, as they’re industry-standard, concise, and they even provide navigation in addition to context.