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.

Users tend to navigate websites in different ways, some like searching for an specific item or product, some like to navigate through product pages. A website should help users to get their goal, to find something they want to buy, through different paths.

"It is very important to place all those navigation options always in the same location…"

Place different navigation options in your website, like search, menus and pagination. It is very important to place all those navigation options always in the same location, that way you avoid confusing users.

A good example of this usability pattern is 1800flowers.com, the online flower shop. They give users many navigation options, search, a way to narrow the search, a top menu and pagination. Notice that navigation options stay in the same place through the whole site. Good design.

Navigation options stay in the same place…

Using tabs is sometimes a very good option for a wed design. Visitors use them to navigate the site and to know where they are.

The JCPenney tab rows are 100% fine. They use a different color for the selected tab, but this color is similar to the one used for the unselected tabs. From the usability point of view, I can imagine that this could affect visually impaired and color blinded people.

Giving users a graphical and shaped sign could be much better for everybody. The MySQL website not only uses a different color for the selected tab but also makes a connection to the menu line below, creating a much obvious and nicer visual effect.

Making product recommendations could improve customer satisfaction and sales if you do it properly. This feature is key for a site like emusic, the music download service, as they have a lot of independent artists that are not well known.

Recommendations are a usability issue as it’s going to make users navigate the site in a better way. At emusic, it is one of the most important ways of navigating the site. For example, they placed automatic recommendations of new arrivals (targeted to the user) in the homepage:

They also have reviews written by editors:

Related artists when looking an album:

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