SpyreStudios - Design and Development Magazine

Breadcrumb navigation offers a visually enticing way for users to keep track and know where they’re specifically located as they navigate your site. Overall, it increases the usability of your website, especially if it has various pages that need to be organized and structured in a certain hierarchical order.

More than often breadcrumbs are usually styled horizontally and can be pretty hard to miss if created effectively. This provides the user with easy access and can either show their path, location or attribute (which we will discuss further below).

Why Use Them?

There are various reasons why anyone would use breadcrumbs, one of the top choices is the massive gain in usability which allows the user to freely move up or down within your site’s hierarchy with little or no issue. Not only that, but it’ll be easier for them to track their location and eliminate repetitive actions (such as using the main navigation and the browsers back button over and over).

A majority of navigation menus are not designed to leave a “breadcrumb trail” for the user to follow making it harder for them to track where they’re currently at within all the pages of a website.

Some breadcrumbs are also easy on the eyes due to their usually appealing designs that grab a users attention with very little effort. This gives way to a smoother and effective navigation process that uses up a small portion of the screen.

When Do We Need Them?

Now that we’ve covered the why, we’ll be covering the when to use breadcrumb navigation.

Use breadcrumbs when…

• Your users are likely to land on any given page from an external site.
• You’re looking to integrate an element that can be used as a secondary navigation which provides further details.
• The website thrives on a hierarchical structure that delivers content in a similar manner.
• You have pages that are nested deep into the hierarchical structure of your site and can’t be visually seen within the main navigation menu or by any other means except a secondary navigation.
• You’d like to provide your users with a way to track their location and easily browse back to a higher level within your websites hierarchy.

It’s not recommend for you to use a breadcrumb navigation if you have a website that has no hierarchical structure and could benefit the most from a simple navigation menu. As much as breadcrumbs can help, they can also cause damage to the usability of your website if used incorrectly.

Diving Into Its Mechanism

Breadcrumbs seem simple enough to integrate into your website, right? Not necessarily. Just as there are different types of navigation menus that service certain types of websites, there are different types of breadcrumbs that can be used specifically for the type of content structure your website was developed for.

As promised we will cover the three different types of breadcrumbs we briefly spoke of within the introduction. The first one is a path based breadcrumb that shows the user the exact steps they’ve taken in order to reach their current location. This dynamic breadcrumb trail will always give a user the option to backtrack wherever they’ve come from and how they got to the specific page their on.

The second type of breadcrumb is location based, it lets the user know where they’re at within the websites hierarchy. Normally they will used wherever there’s a plethora of pages that are assigned to a specific region within a website.

And the third is an attribute breadcrumb which gives the user useful information that will categorize the page they’re currently on. In example, a user could be navigating through a clothing website, once the user reaches an item they click on it and that takes them to another page where they have a variety of options such as style, color, fabric and more.

Each of these options have their own page and when chosen, the user will be transported to another page that has further options. Now you can say that the pages which contain the style, colors and fabrics are an attribute of the item chosen.

The Showcase

Guardian ↓

The Glasgow Collective ↓

Wufoo ↓

Girl Scouts ↓

Delicious ↓

Apple ↓

Yahoo! TV ↓

CoolSpotters ↓

Hillside Group ↓

BubbleStick ↓

Crooked Tongues ↓

Mia & Maggie ↓

Target ↓

Design Collectors ↓

Bell ↓

Nasa ↓

Ideo ↓

Bridge 55 ↓

Nestle ↓

Marchand Trucs ↓

Your Turn To Talk

I hope you enjoyed this post and learned a thing or two about breadcrumb navigation. Please feel free to chime in by leaving a comment below :)