Stuff in my head

belt and braces

I quite often end up arguing for the addition of breadcrumbs to site layouts i’m working on. Sure they’re not useful all the time but for any site with a categorisation system that introduces nested content (which is pretty much most i tend to work on) then i have this policy.

Its better to have a breadcrumb and not need it, than to need a breadcrumb and not have it.

See what I did there? Not exactly Nietzsche but hey.

So the naysayers (don’t you hate the sayers of nay?) and detractors of this flawless philosophy often come back to me with stats. The stats say “96.658% of our users don’t use the breadcrumbs” and I say “your stats are silly, because they only tell me what people DID do”. 

“Oh” they say. Or something like that.

Y’see. Breadcrumbs aren’t just for navigation, they don’t necessarily need to play an active role in getting people around your site. But, and this is the important bit - people use them even when they don’t realise - for orientation, context and yes a bit of wayfinding too. Signage only tends to get noticed when it isn’t there (or it’s shit). 

So my take on it is pretty simple - if it’s not going to offend anyone or cause you physical pain to implement it - use breadcrumbs.