Interesting, honest and dogma-free discussion of breadcrumb trails in website design at Asterisk [via guyweb].

Upsum seems to be “as a designer I always put them in, but as a user I never use them”. Research and testing of breadcrumb-style solutions I’ve done supports this – they tend to reassure users rather than be a crucial part of the interface. It is a crumb: a tiny part of the picture people form of where their are in the structure of a site, and where it’s possible to go next.

IMHO, If you don’t have a highly-structured service, or screen-space is at a premium, there may be better ways to spend your effort and pixels in the service of users.

Had interesting comments in user tests along the lines of “Well, it’s something that all proper websites have, but I don’t really know what it’s for”. On iCan we’re tryng to give people lots of these crumbs with which to make their own way with what best suits them.

There’s a primary ‘location’ cue: a fairly traditional ‘vertical-slice’ hierarchical breadcrumb trail, prominent “see also” links which display a ‘horizontal-slice’ across the service, and at the bottom of each page, a ‘last things you looked at’ pot of links. This aims to support “The Cycle” hypertext pattern, allowing people to flip back and forth through a self-reinforcing trail of oft-visited links.