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I was trying to make my website mobile friendly. I have gone through many reviews about breadcrumbs in mobile websites. Some say it is good and some say it is bad. After going through the reviews, I was thinking of the following design approach.

(a) add location icon in menu
(b) on click of that direct users to a separate page
(c) the new page to show detailed navigation path from home till the page user is currently in
(d) also show all relative links in that page.

is this a good design approach from the point of user experience from mobile and desktops?

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  • What's your current & potential page depth? Aug 3, 2017 at 7:29
  • 1
    5 levels maximum
    – Kiran
    Aug 3, 2017 at 8:30

3 Answers 3

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Your approach sounds a bit complicated, i think it would be easier to just navigate back.

Check this approach: https://dribbble.com/shots/2757586-mobile-breadcrumb-navigation

Swipeable breadcrumbs seem more convenient and natural on mobile, i don't have any studies or tests to back this statement up but clicking on mobile is not my favourite task.

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I don't think it is a good idea to use breadcrumb navigation in mobile as it makes the navigation and the flow highly complicated.

Refer to this answer for more clarification

Use sidebar navigation instead and try to reduce nesting for mobile site. In the side nav you could probably have 2 levels (maybe 3 at max) and it is always easy to show the user where they currently are. Here are some examples:

Side nav with multiple levels Side nav showing where the user currently is

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Breadcrumbs offer alternative methods of wayfinding, and can help provide context users may not have gotten so far depending on how they arrived at the current page.

For example, maybe they arrived at the section via a cross-link or a related content feature. In this case they had an abnormal flow and hitting back won't take them to the overview page for the item detail page they might be on.

They also may be unaware that there are other related offerings or that the current page is part of a family.

Breadcrumbs help users understand where they are, and also how the site is structured.

They don't need to be persistent at the top but having them there can still help users.

Read more: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/breadcrumbs/

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