Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are small textual representations of your location in the structure of a site. Often present at the top of blog pages, they are useful for quickly figuring out the page current relation to the website. Research have shown that less than half users actively use breadcrumbs.

Inside an online shop you could discover a breadcrumbs such as the following:

Home > Furniture > Chairs > Leather Chairs

It provides the following advantages:

• information to the user about where they are in the site
• shortcut links that allow users to "jump" to previous categories in the sequence without using the Return key.

1. Less than half of users use the breadcrumb trail to navigate a website.
2. Most users reported that they noticed its presence.
3. Being taught about the usefulness of breadcrumb trails led to increased usage

Evidence and further readings

Here you can find a list of references to dive deeper on the subject.

• Lida, B., Hull, K., and Pilcher, K., (2003), Breadcrumb Navigation: An exploratory study of usage, Usability News 5.1.
• Hull, S. S. (2004). "Influence of Training and Exposure on the Usage of Breadcrumb Navigation." Usability News, 6(1).