Many of us have sites we use time after time. We know them well, we just want help in getting quickly from oen part to another. If browsing the TV schedule a breadscrumb trail can take me back from a program details to that day on the channel, that channel or the range of channels. If shopping I can get quickly back to that department, and when finished there up a level to choose the next department. If tracing my family tree I can get back to the same census to try again, up a level to search in another year, or another level to look for different kind of info.

In my opinion breadcrumbs are most useful when you know a site, not when browsing / searching for the first time.

Another alternative kind of location breadcrumbs that I’ve seen (and really like) is to use a hierarchy of tabs (or menus). That way, the user can see all possible choices on each level, not just the specific navigation trail down to the current page. An example is the Swedish bank http://www.avanza.se (in swedish, but you can still understand the concept of the tabs).

Speaking from my own experiences, I’ve conducted dozens of usability tests on sites that have used breadcrumbs, and in all those tests not one user ever actually used the breadcrumb navigation! A few users did quickly glance at the breadcrumb trail if they felt they were lost, but none used it (even though many versions of breadcrumbs were tested, including the type that used blue text with underlines, denoting a hyperlink).

In the vast majority of instances, the users typically did one of two things instead of using breadcrumbs, they most often tried the “Search” box (if available) and/or they tried using the main navigation to try to re-set themselves at a much higher level in the information architecture.

After witnessing this pattern repeat itself many times over many tests on various sites, I began advising the web groups I was working with to eliminate the breadcrumb nav, in favor of using the gained space to present more content.

However, I have been advised in the past by Search Engine Optimization specialists that there is one important benefit of breadcrumb navigation, indexation. This is becaue they believe the breadcrumb navigation presents a useful way for search engines to index a site. I guess that advice is not exactly user friendly, unless your users are spiders, but that’s what they recommended.

I suppose that as with everything, it depends on how the site is structured and what sort of labelling & other navigation systems are in place before a determination of whether breadcrumbs are helpful (or not) can be made.

Anyway, that’s just my 2 cents, and I really am enjoying the discussions on this topic, thanks all!

craig

I would like to start by saying that Jared is a master of stirring controversy. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. For such a simple topic as bread crumbs…..I’ve really gotten into this.

I would also like to say that Paula Thornton’s comment was very enlightening as well. “Navigation of any sort is a crutch.”

I really don’t think Jared is saying not to use bread crumbs in websites. I do think what he’s saying, tho, is that in his experience of observing sites that designers have become attached to bread crumbs as an up-front thought of the design of the site. Afterall, everyone else is doing it, I’m expected to also, right? “Let’s see..where should I put the bread crumbs”………then later……..”Let’s see ….. how many pages should I have in my site?”

Someone commented about landing on a page from a search engine for example. And then later not knowing where they there potentially. I was thinking of this very article / page when I read this comment. There was key information about the page that was important to me. One is that I was on the 2nd article of a series of articles and two I realized that I hadn’t read the 1st article. But, I was soon comforted in knowing how to get to the first article because there was a link to it clearly in the first paragraph of this article. No the link wasn’t in a bread crumb trail but I still had context for where I was at.

Yes, by the way, I can imagine that there are many occasions when breadcrumbs are very useful. I can’t say that I’ve never used one. But in agreement with Jared, I have to say that MAYBE … just MAYBE the crumbs were useful to me was because the site as a whole failed me from a design point of view and I was just too consumed by the pretty layout of colors and animated icons to know that I wasn’t having the best experience.

So…if you took two different or even a hundred different websites with identical content but different information architectures and tested the usage metrics of the bread crumbs, I think you’ll see that they get used at different rates even tho the content is virtually the same across all the variations. Once again…..it doesn’t make bread crumbs bad, but they can give designers a sense of comfort that is mis-prioritized.

As a last analogy….is it possible that bread crumbs and many other common practices are like an emergency break. If I were a car designer, I would sure feel a lot more comfortable with it in there, but I’d sure hope that you never have to use it when you’re driving down the highway.

Sorry for the long post.

Spend the time on understanding content needs first and then structuring it to map users to that piece of content. Then determine if breadcrumbs are needed.

No, sitemaps and breadcrumbs should not substitute for poor site organization. They are valuable completely on their own, and may help the designer pinpoint structural problems. If it is difficult to create breadcrumbs or a basic site map, that may indicate the site itself hasn’t been organized well to begin with.

To add my vote to his: I’m trying to figure out how often I navigate a site without using Search first–either an external search like Google, or the site’s Search box. I’d guess it’s something like 10%-25%.

A suggested design principle: “Design each page for people who have no idea how they got there.”

Hm, it should have been called “Flintstone Navigation”, shouldn’t it?

When so many people enter individual pages in sites directly from search engines, I think breadcrumbs and other context-setters are more valuable now than they ever were before.

Navigation of any sort is a crutch. It’s a synthetic structure to connect a person to what they need/want. The ideal would be to have no navigation. The reality is somewhere blended between.

Sadly, I only use sitemaps when the clearly obvious scenarios aren’t supported — therefore I’m having to use it as a crutch for a bad design. In those cases, the sitemap is extremely useful, but it’s useful for the wrong reasons.

All navigation is wrong. It’s a compromise of a collection of mental models — therefore it matches no one’s natural mental model. Our job is to optimize the dichotomy of reality — that’s design.