Good Bread Crumbs, Bad Bread Crumbs

Location bread crumbs tell users where they are, they give orientation and provide links to easily go back to an already visited page. What are location bread crumbs? A good design example I found was at Alexa.com.

Alexa’s approach is a very good one that improves the overall website usability. Nothing weird, they stick to the standard. This bread crumbs are an ordered collection of visited pages, they are separated by ‘ > ‘ and every word is a link. These give orientation to users and a way to go back to others sections. I was surprise seeing that was difficult to find good design examples to put into this article.

Overstock, the online outlet, includes check boxes into the bread crumbs. Horrible solution, please don’t do it.

AllPosters.com, the poster store, developed bread crumbs that look like a windows directory tree. This is a developer structure that not always represent users’ mental model. This option works most of the times, I guess, but I would not use it.

IKEA.com does not have bread crumbs at all. As a user, if you navigate to a product, for example a sofa, you will notice how useful bread crumbs could be.