• They act as a signpost to where the user is within a site. This is particularly beneficial to users that arrive on your site via a search engine. The breadcrumb trail allows these users to identify what section of your site that they are in, as well as providing a quick preview of the type of content the site holds.
• Breadcrumb trails also allow users to move back to any page in the trail with a single click, rather than multiple clicks of the browser back button.
• They also provide some SEO benefits and Google is now including breadcrumb trails in their search results.

The name “breadcrumb trail” suggests a path that the user has taken to reach their current location (think Hansel and Gretel) and this is certainly true when considering a very linear user experience. However, that linear experience is no longer truly representative of the way in which many users interact with websites, particularly content rich sites where users have a high level of engagement.

Consider the following example, a user arrives at the home page of a news website, they click on the primary navigation option Entertainment, then a sub-heading Movies and then an article. Up to this point the breadcrumb serves the users well in reflecting the journey.

It is quite likely that in order to increase the amount of time that the user spends on the site, in our example above, users are encouraged to click on some form of related content (e.g. blog, video, image slideshow). Typically, this content is located in a different section of the website which results in a resetting of the breadcrumb trail. This suggests that despite its name, the breadcrumb trail is actually intended to demonstrate the location of content within a site’s IA, rather than how the user has arrived at a particular page (insert image).

What does all of this mean for the implementation of the breadcrumb trail, and recommendations we make as user experience professionals? Although our experience suggests that only a minority of users will use breadcrumb trails we still feel that they have a role to play on a website; however the definition and application of that role is a lot more ambiguous than it used to be. What do you think?

That being said, even though the majority of your users might be landing deeper in your site, it is not to say that particular content should not be easily accessible from the homepage. Often when users are browsing a site they will use the homepage as a base to access different areas of your site, continually coming back and using the homepage as a reference or starting point. So even though users may have initially arrived deeper in your site, there is a good chance that during their visit they will click through to your homepage in order to locate other content.

Generally speaking, we feel that tasks presented during user testing are largely independent from each other and we encourage users to approach each task as if they had just arrived at the site. While it may be appropriate to base the first task of a testing session on a page other than the homepage, in most cases, we recommend that subsequent tasks begin from the homepage. The homepage provides a logical reset point from which users can begin their next task and provides an opportunity to test the effectiveness of the homepage and site navigation.

Taste.com.au Recipe

One of our Clients was in development of a website that targeted aspiring cooks. In a nutshell, they wanted to confirm that their planned website was in line with user needs, and also that they were on the right track with the specific functionality that had been developed.  We used focus groups and moderated one-on-one user testing on the project.

During the focus groups, the importance of search became very clear. As mentioned above, this in itself was hardly ground breaking. The intriguing bit however was how much search engines (and by default, Google) had become the de facto homepage for this particular category. User behaviour was to go to Google and search some aspect of cooking, and to proceed to the websites recommended in the natural search results. The use of Google was so much a part of the process that the users were nearly universally unable to name any of the websites which were dominant (by traffic counts) in the category. The users knew the sites only by the pages that they had linked to via Google, which tended to be deep within the individual sites.

The behaviour was so prevalent that it became clear that our Client would need to rethink their homepage design and information architecture. Specifically, they had designed the site so that some of the core features were only clearly visible from the homepage, and were less easily accessed via the individual pages of the site. Understanding the user behaviour in this category led us to recommend to the client that they rethink their content pages, and consider how each one was effectively the ‘homepage’ of their site for most users. They needed to reconsider how to dial up the site’s branding, and how they could introduce some of the other features of the site (which had only previously been available on the site’s homepage) to the users without getting in the way of the core purpose for the users’ visit.