A Case for Breadcrumbs?
Jakob Nielsen is pounding on another of his long-time favorites: Breadcrumb Navigation . I’ve had mixed feelings for a long time on whether breadcrumbs were worth the space in the prime real estate they typically consume, for something that is patently secondary navigation. But as I watch our users interact with them… they’re gaining my grudging respect.
As Nielsen notes, breadcrumbs really don’t take up that much space, even if it is prime real estate. So even a small amount of use can result in a large amount of benefit per cost in space. And they are an easy way to deliver consistency across a site or web application. No matter what other busy-ness is going on, the breadcrumbs provide a visual and conceptual anchor for where I am.
And as he says, breadcrumbs themselves are pretty standard across sites:
It’s exactly because of breadcrumbs’ modest nature that people are becoming accustomed to them. There aren’t too many ways to mess up breadcrumbs in a design. No fancy stuff, just a line of textual links.
Breadcrumbs are almost always implemented the same way, with a horizontal line that progresses from the highest level to the lowest, one step at a time; starts with the homepage and ends with the current page; has a simple text link for each level …; and has a simple, one-character separator between the levels (usually ”>”).
So, I think I’m going to cut breadcrumbs some slack. Implemented well, they can help and are unlikely to do harm.