I tried to make a change to a site I'm new to working on, to remove the page title as the last element of the breadcrumb and simply treat the title itself as the last element in the breadcrumb, including a > last and keeping the title immediately below. I was surprised that not only wasn't it a simple argument to make, but I met staid refusal from the design team.
My argument was that repeating the page title is redundant, removing anything that's redundant and isn't functional is good, especially given the fairly busy nature of their pages, and that it's not necessary to orient the user since the location information is clear either way. (We have no research showing people lost or confused, but we do have research showing people having difficulty finding things near the top of the page, albeit only in wireframes.) Their argument is that it's useful to reinforce where the user is, and that since people don't focus on it unless it's needed secondarily for navigation, it adds negligible to no visual noise to the page. The other arguments are that it's better for SEO and we have bigger fish to fry. Nielsen says include it but doesn't say why (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/breadcrumbs.html). A survey shows a surprising lack of consistency on this issue. Apple, Don Norman's site, and Ideo don't repeat the page title. Yahoo!, Google and nngroup.com do. I probably won't be able to make this change happen, but curious on others thoughts? ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
