Breadcrumbs are not crummy

During brainstorming meetings here at Silas, we try to keep ourselves from sweating over the small stuff, but sometimes our desire to do things “just right” gets us. So imagine my delight when Jakob Nielsen typed: “Not all design decisions are a matter of website survival.” He continues,

“Of course, it’s important to get the big things right, or you won’t have any users. But getting the small things right enhances usability and fosters user comfort.”

So there, our hour long discussions about naming conventions and other “small things” are somewhat justified. But, I wasn’t going to talk about naming conventions. The topic today is about breadcrumbs. True to the Hansel and Gretel analogy, they help you retrace your path on a website. An example of a site that uses breadcrumbs is Westminster.org. On this page you can see that you are in the “connect with us” section, looking at the “groups” they have in church, and the “Alpha” group in particular.

Here are other things Nielsen highlighted about the usability of breadcrumbs:

• Breadcrumbs show people their current location relative to higher-level concepts, helping them understand where they are in relation to the rest of the site.
• Breadcrumbs afford one-click access to higher site levels and thus rescue users who parachute into very specific but inappropriate destinations through search or deep links.
• Breadcrumbs never cause problems in user testing: people might overlook this small design element, but they never misinterpret breadcrumb trails or have trouble operating them.
• Breadcrumbs take up very little space on the page.

Read the full article on breadcrumb navigation from Jakob Nielsen’s website and let us know what you think.