Website Breadcrumbs

by Dr. Bob Bailey

August, 2003

How useful are “breadcrumbs?”

Breadcrumbs are a navigation element that theoretically allows users to orient themselves within a website. They are primarily intended to help users avoid becoming lost by indicating to them where they are at in the website. A second purpose for breadcrumbs is to offer shortcut links for users to “jump” to previous categories in a sequence.

Breadcrumbs usually are placed near the top of the page, and look like the following:

Home > Furniture > Chairs > Leather Chairs

There are at least two past research studies suggesting that breadcrumbs can lead to more efficient site navigation and improved user satisfaction (Bowler, et al., 2001; Maldaonado and Resnick, 2002).

Bonnie Lida, Spring Hull, and Katie Pilcher at the Wichita State University conducted a study on “breadcrumb navigation” (2003). They attempted to determine if participants used breadcrumbs when given a list of items to find on a website. Seventy-two people participated in their study. The participants averaged 24 years of age, and all were experienced Web users.

They provided this task within two sites: Google and Office Max. The Google questions were information searching tasks, such as

The Office Max purchasing tasks were like the following:

The tasks were organized so that using breadcrumbs would enhance efficiency. After all tasks were completed, users answered questions related to their knowledge of breadcrumbs, and to recall whether breadcrumbs were present.

The average breadcrumb usage was fairly low. In fact, half of the users were categorized as low (or no) breadcrumb users. About 79% of the participants recalled seeing a breadcrumb path when using Google, while only 40% recalled breadcrumbs when using the Office Max site. An analysis of the click path for both sites showed that breadcrumbs were considerably under-used.

The researchers concluded that the overall use of breadcrumbs (in their study) was low. They observed that not all participants even understood the function of breadcrumbs. Even regular breadcrumb users were not found to be more efficient than users who did not use the breadcrumbs. These participants preferred using other navigational methods to find information, such as the Back button, the navigation bars, and searching.

Even though the previous two studies suggested that breadcrumbs did assist users, this study did not find that to be the case.

References

Bowler, D., Ng, W., and Schwartz, P. (2001), Navigation bars for hierarchical websites. Retrieved 01/20/03 from University of Maryland, Student HCI Online Research, http://www.otal.umd.edu/SHORE2001/navBar/index.htm

Lida, B., Hull, S. and Pilcher, K. (2003), Breadcrumb navigation: An exploratory study of usage, Usability News, 5.1, http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/51/breadcrumb.htm

Maldonado, C.A. and Resnick, M.L. (2002), Do common user interface design patterns improve navigation? Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 46th Annual Meeting, 1315-1319.