Good Approach for Multi Level Sub-Menu for Section of Site

Question

I'm designing the menu for a website with three main sections. The main menu does not have sub-menus, and is used to navigate between the sections of the site. Since the different sections of the site are substantially different and all but one of the sections doesn't require a sub-menu for navigation, I'm not sure that the section menu needs to be in the header at all; also, putting the section menu in the header would require a redesign of the header across all sections.

The solution I am currently toying with is putting the section menu on the last element of the breadcrumb bar. Something like this:

The menu above is a hack on the Responsive Multi-Level Menu, which has a usable example here, the main difference being that I changed the trigger from a hamburger menu to a link. (I will also need to change the submenu trigger to the arrow, since otherwise pages with sub-menus are unreachable)

My question concerns usability, especially since I haven't seen menus in breadcrumbs before and I don't have access to UX testing. Will this approach create problems for users, and/or are there ways around those problems? (I'm not opposed to alternative suggestions in the comments)

Answer 1

In my opinion it is not a good solution to connect a menu with the breadcrumbs:

Many users know the breadcrumbs pattern. They expect that breadcrumbs indicate the current path through the hierarchy of the site - not more and not less. It is unlikely that they will click on the last breadcrumb item as they don't expect anything there (esp. because the last item usually shows the current location - nobody will click on it, therefore it is often greyed out). Thus many people won't notice your menu.

Ideas:

• put the submenu on the side
• Can the contents of the submenu pages be displayed on one scrollable page? In this case your submenu can be transformed to a table of contents (e.g. like in wikipedia articles).

Answer 2

bread crumbs are used to show the trail of your navigation, Including menu in that is not advisable as a user couldn't get to know about it in the first look, the best way is to use sub-navigation like tabbing. Also as you said the contents are different it is better to go with sub-navigation

Answer 3

I don't think most users would expect to find a menu in one of the breadcrumbs. I've mocked up an idea of how you could handle the submenu of a particular section: by including a horizontal nav menu for that section.

^{download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups}