Design

users don’t care where they are

Reading Good Experience – The Page Paradigm

“Users don’t much care “where they are” in the website. So-called “breadcrumb links,” which show the user the exact hierarchy of the website as they click further down, are a nice but mostly irrelevant technology. It’s not that users don’t understand the links; it’s that they don’t care.
Let me say it again, Max Bialystock-style:
USERS DON’T CARE WHERE THEY ARE IN THE WEBSITE. ”

no, they really don’t. They don’t care at all. They care where they are going. They care to know if they are there yet. they care about where they wish to go next. where they are in the grand scheme of things is entirely a cause for concern of the people who know a bit too much. User researchers who ask in usability testing “do you know where you are” then report worriedly that the user doesn’t are every bit as deluded as the design weenies who obsess over it. The user, meanwhile is unworried about where they are: they are sitting on a chair facing a computer, that offers an address bar to a search engine if at any point they can’t think where to go next.

Breadcrumbs, if noticed, are mostly good for navigating to a wider selection of stuff. Knowing that, is the classic breadcrumb design really the most effective way to offer that functionality?

6 Comments

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  3. 3
    Steve Hunt

    “They care where they are going. They care to know if they are there yet. they care about where they wish to go next. where they are in the grand scheme of things is entirely a cause for concern of the people who know a bit too much.”

    One thing you miss out on here, which I think is important, is that users DO care about where they HAVE been, and where they have come FROM.

    Personal Orientation of an indiviudal user’s journey is different from Location within a site hierarchy.

    So whilst breadcrumbs as a mean of location within the ‘grand scheme’ structure may be an irrelevant technology, I would suspect that some sort of ‘tool’ of personal orientation could well be more than relevant.

    Maybe.

    This however:

    “Breadcrumbs, if noticed, are mostly good for navigating to a wider selection of stuff.”

    is a very good point.

  4. 4
    christina

    I have never seen any issues in testing showing users care about where they came FROM. They use the back button to go back to they can start their search over. The try to refind useful things they remember seeing earlier (how to support this is still one of the giant unsolved mysteries of the web). They don’t want to look at pages they have already seen and deemed useless (which is why not showing a visited state is EVIL. but caring where they came from as an abstract desire? not so much.

  5. 5
    Steve Hunt

    “They don’t want to look at pages they have already seen and deemed useless”

    I’d agree with this as true, but i can’t tell you the amount of times in testing where I’ve seen users feeling lost and awkward.

    They do of course use the back button, but this doesn’t give them much of a visual cue as to where they might have made a ‘mistake on their journey’.

    Which is where “”Breadcrumbs, if noticed, are mostly good for navigating to a wider selection of stuff.”” becomes important.

    Interesting.

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