Alertbox - Breadcrumb Navigation

In his Alertbox article of the 10th of April 2007, Doctor Jakob Nielson discusses the increasing usefulness of the breadcrumb-style of navigation in web design.

Breadcrumb navigation is a simple tool, but an effective one. It’s a single line of text, usually at the top of the page, which shows the user’s current position within a web site’s hierarchy. This makes it easy for many users to move about a site, assuming that it’s organized in a logical manner.

Recent studies have shown that the use of this kind of secondary navigation is gaining increasing popularity on the web. Doctor Nielson suggests that this is because of their simple nature, which makes them very easy for users to understand and operate. This nature also means that they don’t have any true effect on browsers who don’t want to use them.

They shouldn’t be a history of the user’s browsing on a site though. The purpose of breadcrumbs is to keep the browser oriented as to where they are in the site’s hierarchy. People have a tendency to get lost when browsing a site and that type of breadcrumb trail wouldn’t be very useful. Also, there is the fact that it duplicates the function of the Back button.

Personally, I’ve known about the importance of breadcrumb navigation for some time now. In early-2007, I was kept from placing in a regional web design contest because of my site’s lack of breadcrumb navigation. Since then, I’ve made an effort to always include that function when it’s needed.