http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/52/breadcrumb.htm
In general, the breadcrumb trail serves two purposes: 1) it provides information to users as to where they are located within the site, and 2) it offers shortcut links for users to jump; to previously viewed pages without using the Back button, other navigation bars, or typing in a keyword search.
This article from the The Software Usability Research Laboratory (SURL) at Wichita State University in Kansas. The researchers state:
“Breadcrumb users were found to use the Back button less often than users who did not use the breadcrumb; however, no differences were found in the efficiency measures of total pages visited, navigation bar clicks, embedded link clicks, or time to complete the search tasks.”
This is a followup to an earlier study which stated:
“We found the overall usage of the breadcrumb in site navigation to be low. Breadcrumb users were not found to be more efficient than users who did not use the breadcrumb. Participants used a variety of navigational means, such as the Back button, left and top navigation bars, and searching to find the information instead of or in addition to the breadcrumb tool.”
My concern with the first study is that it was performed on only 2 sites, one of which was Google. Google is too well known as a “type your keywords and get results” type search engine to effectively gauge the use of navigating it alternatively using breadcrumb trails. This latest study took a more reasonable approach of building a artificial, product based site - a site where users would seem to be more likely to use the breadcrumb trails.
While the numbers don’t show breadcrumbs to be a “killer app” for navigation, I’m still a big proponent of them. They force site developers to think about their site structure in more detail, and take up such little screen real estate that they shouldn’t confuse users, regardless of what Mr. Neilsen says.
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