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Breadcrumbs: we’re doing them wrong
If they’re meant to help us find our way back, shouldn’t they — wait for it — point backward?
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About 18 months ago I wrote a story on Medium that blew up. Over the years our design firm has published scores of articles about branding and UX design, but to this day my 2,000-word essay on breadcrumbs is by far the most read and most liked of them all. Which, for a topic as pedantic as the proper use of breadcrumbs in UX design, is fairly hilarious. It’s become a running joke around our office. I mean, what could possibly be more interesting than breadcrumbs?
Jokes aside, the article’s popularity got me thinking. If breadcrumb trails are useful, can they be made more useful? Their purpose, after all, is to improve user experience, and research shows these little strings of text links can, in fact, be a helpful tool for way-finding and navigation. But is there something else we, as UX designers, could do to make them even better?
The answer, I believe, is “Yes.”
This past summer our firm began one of our largest-ever website redesign projects. The client is a community college in Albany, Oregon. Their website contained thousands of pages and got tons of traffic, but it had some serious way-finding problems.