The Breadcrumb Fallacy

The ubiquitous breadcrumbs, intended to help users understand the information hierarchy of a site. But are they really the right solution?

The Nielsen-Norman Group posted a well-written, but largely misleading article: Breadcrumbs: 11 Design Guidelines for Desktop and Mobile. The article describes how to effectively use breadcrumbs and they are correct in that respect, but the article misleads readers into believing that hierarchy-oriented sites are a successful design approach. What if breadcrumbs are solving the wrong problem?

As the article points out: “Breadcrumbs pose an inherent tension with polyhierarchical sites (in which a page has more than one parent). In such situations, we do not recommend showing two or more breadcrumb trails reflecting the different paths in the polyhierarchy, because they will confuse users and take a lot of space at the top of the page.” Because most people don’t understand the concept, the article fails to mention task-oriented designs. A task-oriented approach advocates replicating any object, feature, or content anywhere and everywhere on the site where it directly supports the users’ task. This is similar to, but still different from, a polyhierarchical site. Rather than one page having multiple paths, an object may be in multiple places in a site. (Read more about task-oriented designs here)

Breadcrumbs are an artifact of content or feature oriented hierarchies, which are inherently less successful models than task-oriented designs. Breadcrumbs are therefore bandaids for a poor design. The more successful solution involves redesigning a site around the users’ problems, goals and tasks rather than the features or content.

Breadcrumbs are a good solution, to the wrong problem.