Usefulness of Breadcrumb Navigation

I have always found Breadcrumb navigation very useful and Jakob Nielsen in his latest alertbox has written at length about usefulness of breadcrumb navigation which is considered to be secondary navigation.

Here are few important tips about breadcrumbs:

• Breadcrumbs show people their current location relative to higher-level concepts, helping them understand where they are in relation to the rest of the site.
• Breadcrumbs afford one-click access to higher site levels and thus rescue users who parachute into very specific but inappropriate destinations through search or deep links.
• Breadcrumbs never cause problems in user testing: people might overlook this small design element, but they never misinterpret breadcrumb trails or have trouble operating them.
• Breadcrumbs take up very little space on the page.

There has been an argument that breadcrumbs are so minute that many people overlook them and they benefit only a majority. So why to use such a design element?
Jakob Nielsen writes

As I've long argued, breadcrumbs are different than most other little-used design elements for the simple reason that they don't hurt users who ignore them.

To read the entire article, click here.