Breadcrumbs – don’t think about just do it

No this is nothing to do with healthy eating or feeding birds. It is to do with making web sites easier to use.

Breadcrumbs use a single line of text to show a page's location in the site hierarchy. While secondary, this navigation technique is extremely beneficial to users.

These few words are from Jakob Nielsen's latest newsletter. Mr Nielsen is “the man” when it comes to web site usability. It is worth taking note of what he says.

Breadcrumbs won't help a site answer users' questions or fix hopelessly confused information architecture. All that breadcrumbs do is make it easier for users to move around the site, assuming its content and overall structure make sense. That's sufficient contribution for something that takes up only one line in the design.

Breadcrumbs show people where they are in a site in relation to the rest of the navigation.

They make web sites better for all ages of people and especially the 50-plus. Dick Stroud