All of the blogs I have ready about breadcrumbs mention that breadcrumbs are used for secondary navigation and shouldn't really act as primary navigation. What is the reason for this convention?
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1What actually makes you think they would be suitable for primary navigation? – JonW♦ Jan 8 '16 at 13:17
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1If I'm at the home page and I want to get to Bluetooth Wireless Speakers (Which is nested under Speakers > Wireless > Bluetooth) I don't see any way to navigate there using just breadcrumbs unless you have some sort of tree chart looking breadcrumbs taking up the whole page. – DasBeasto Jan 8 '16 at 13:54
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@JonW I Googled for best ways to use breadcrumbs and every blog/article mentioned it's not for primary navigation. So I was just wondering, what could be the reasons. – Nitin Kamate Feb 14 '16 at 2:08
TL;DR Main menu leads the user, while breadcrumbs are following him. They relate like a GPS navigator and a GPS tracker.
Main navigation supports and helps to form user's mental model of what is on the site. It has constant structure and is presented on the same place, with the same information. It's very reliable and consistent mean for navigational tasks.
Breadcrumbs, on the contrast, are dynamic and can be build in a different ways, following the user interaction pathes. So they are dependant on user's behaviour and don't show clearly the site content. They are helpful as a secondary navigation mean.
answered Jan 8 '16 at 13:10
There are no hard rules here, so lets take a look at examples and see whether they make sense as a primary navigation in one particular case.
