The fact that somebody spends 4:30 minutes on a given page isn’t necessarily a good indicator and the fact that somebody leaves within 30 seconds isn’t necessarily a bad thing. While we often focus on exit rates and bounce rates and time spent on a page, these indicators rarely reveal the full story of what exactly users are doing on the site. And once they do, there isn’t really much reason to stay on the site. On the contrary: the content might be so well-organized that people actually find what they need very quickly - perhaps even before visiting the website in the first place, just by exploring Google’s search results. However, when navigation and search are barely used, it’s not necessarily because the website is poorly designed or built. On the contrary: we meet users where they are, displaying answers directly, so there is no need to visit the website. It’s not because something has gone wrong. Sometimes, redesigned websites get a significant traffic drop. And once we don’t really have any options left, we abandon altogether. If anything doesn’t work as expected, we just don’t use it anymore because we don’t trust it anymore. We scan, identify patterns and trust our instincts.Īnd sometimes, if we don’t find what we are after, our journeys turn into wild explorations of pages and categories of all kinds - often intense, chaotic, time-consuming and frustrating. We just wander around, trusting navigation signposts and our extremely unreliable hunches. We click through sidebars, switch between tabs and open mega-drop-downs. This usually happens by scrolling up and down the page - first slowly, then faster - and getting familiar with the navigation menus. national opera website, we assess the breadth of options and features at first. When we land on a website we’ve never visited before, e.g. Once you landed on the page, how would you make sense of where you are? Here, breadcrumbs help a lot. In fact, we probably won’t be able to remember what features and sections we are clicking, but we probably will remember where they are located in the interface. For frequently visited websites, such as a news website, we’ll be using a very limited set of pages and features. We rarely browse through every section one by one, and we rarely even notice all the navigation available on the site. Users can jump between various levels, they can easily go backwards with breadcrumbs, move forward with horizontal navigation on the top, move sideways with the sidebar navigation and switch contexts within the sections of the page with tabs. The global navigation bar, the primary navigation, the breadcrumbs, the sidebar and tabs. On Australia Post, for example, various kinds of navigation need to work together. They all serve different purposes, and work well. Australia Post Service combine plenty of navigation patterns on one page. And sometimes breadcrumbs happen to be the most popular navigation choice on the entire site. On others, categories hardly get any clicks but search queries go through the roof. It’s not uncommon to see that on some websites, search is barely used but main navigation gets a lot of attention. Depending on the task at hand and the frequency of visits, users apply very different modes of navigation. Breadcrumbs UX: How Do People Navigate Websites?Įvery usability test shows that there is no single, general and well-established way of exploring websites. It’s also a part of the upcoming 4-weeks live UX training □ and will be in our recently released video course soon. This article is part of our ongoing series on design patterns. Let’s start by exploring how people navigate websites in the first place, and how exactly breadcrumbs assist us in our journeys. We’ll explore when we actually need breadcrumbs, how people use them, and how to design them better to speed up users’ navigation on our websites. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at some of them. Their design is seemingly obvious, so is their position on the page, and it doesn’t seem like much innovation is required for breadcrumbs to shine.Īs it turns out, there are plenty of fine little details that can either make breadcrumbs confusing or infinitely more useful. You know, those tiny little crumbles of pathways that illustrate where a user currently is in the intricate hierarchy of the website. Nobody gets particularly excited about breadcrumbs navigation. We can improve them with sideways navigation, clearer breadcrumbs paths and accordions on mobile. Breadcrumbs UX are often neglected, but they can be extremely helpful when designing a complex navigation.
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