“Breadcrumb” is not a universal concept
April 20, 2006It’s amazing sometimes how you use a term so often as part of your job that you just assume everybody will know what it means. Even people who’ve never worked in that industry.
Just today, I was talking to a fellow engineer about the portal site we’re building and I mentioned how we should put a breadcrumb on the page. He looked at me like I had just spoken in Swahili or something. Even though he’s been a Java programmer for a while and has worked on various Intranet projects he wasn’t familiar with this particular usage of “breadcrumb”.
I was taken aback, I thought everybody had heard that term. But of course it’s mainly us schlubs spending a lot of time with Web designers who’ve heard that usage.
The thing is, I believe that fewer and fewer sites are actually using breadcrumbs these days. They were very much in vogue at one time, as a way to tell users where they are within a site. Turns out it doesn’t really matter–when you look at the percent of people who bother to click on breadcrumb trails it’s vanishingly small.
People don’t navigate to content, be it menus or breadcrumb trails. They search for it, they Google for content. Google is going to be the death of breadcrumb trails.
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