David Poehlman wrote:
If breadcrumbs are to sight site hierarchy then they are utterly useless in my opinion which is that they are mostly useless anyway. I rarely state opinions but maintain that good design is predicated on clean structure such that it is not necessary to have this kind of hack.
Whatever the organization of a site it is, the user needs to have some way to understand and navigate it. When a site is organized hierarchically, breadcrumbs are a demonstrably effective way to facilitate that. This is completely orthogonal to the question of whether the site has a "clean" structure or not. Clean structures need to be understood and navigated too. Obviously, you could use "breadcrumbs" as a usability bandage to improve understanding and navigation of an "unclean" structure. But that doesn't make every usage of "breadcrumbs" a hack. Likewise offering site search can somewhat mitigate the bad usability effects of unclean structure, but can equally enhance a clean structure.
-- Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
