All About Breadcrumb Navigation
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Breadcrumb links are very popular in discussions of usability. Many people are big fans– including Jakob Nielsen. But do people actually use them? I have my doubts about breadcrumb navigation really working the way people think it does. There are good and bad things that come with their use, but I think that they offer a good opportunity for testing.
Some Good Things About Breadcrumbs:
- They are easy to recognize
- They are easy to use
- They never have a negative usability effect (according to Nielsen)
- They offer alternative navigation
- They open up internal anchor text possibilities
Some Drawbacks of Breadcrumbs
- They are largely redundant
- They are not frequently used
- They dilute the internal link value of already weak interior pages
Your need for breadcrumbs can often be tracked to the failure of your design to communicate or adequately support the needs of your user. If you have made a clear navigational unit your breadcrumbs should be very low use. That said, breadcrumbs are an excellent opportunity for user testing. Jakob Nielsen points out that breadcrumbs are most useful when they create hierarchy; rather than displaying history. Do you have a section of your site that has high exits? It could be that you are not using the right language. By testing breadcrumbs that express a different hierarchy than your main navigation uses you open the opportunity to refine your communication or recapture a segment of users who think about your service/product in a different way.
When testing language in your breadcrumbs segment New vs. Returning Visitors and their use of the breadcrumb navigation links. If Returning Visitors respond better you should be considering refining existing content. If New Users are responding better to the new language you should be considering creating new content.
March 31st, 2009 at 3:01 pm
I think this is a fairly puzzling idea (not disagreeing with the idea though). You want your users to easily understand where to go and where they’ve been; so having clear navigation is obviously optimal.
I feel that most customers get the ‘breadcrumb trail’ and would be confused if their breadcrumb did not take them back to a previous page they were on). I doubt that all customers think in terms of which department they are in (other than say, Women’s vs. Men’s) when they are shopping.
Also, as you stated above, traffic on breadcrumbs tends to be low, so you may not get a good sample size to make a decision on navigation changes. I would rather A/B test different versions of my Left Navigation (for example) to determine which was superior to my customers.
I do like your segmentation idea though. Different types of users have different navigation preferences. (I would expand the segments to Direct Load vs. Paid marketing; buyers vs. non-buyers, etc).
March 31st, 2009 at 3:04 pm
Also, keep in mind that flash sites work a lot differently than html sites so breadcrumbs, per se, are more difficult to do (at least in my experience). It is possible to create flash programming that works like a breadcrumb trail, so maybe it would be easier to test differing breadcrumb trails on a flash site?
March 31st, 2009 at 3:22 pm
Essentially users are ambivalent to breadcrumbs.
This means that testing your hierarchy naming on your breadcrumbs, rather than your main navigation, produces almost no negative risk. On the positive if users increase usage of your breadcrumbs with the change it can help you refine your language. If breadcrumb usage falls from minimal to zero you haven’t actually stopped user progress, only shunted them to the main navigation.
The same test applied to a main navigation can cause more significant frustration for the user. I think that breadcrumbs can serve as a stepping-stone in risk averse business environments.