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Written By:
Ceara Crawshaw
Benoît Meunier

3:17 As a student at a cooking school, I want to be able to navigate the learning site and access the materials I want to learn, even if I’m not sure where everything is.

The concept of combining path-based and location-based breadcrumbs is perplexing, made worse by the fact that users can encounter the same content multiple times, leading to frustration with learning tools. Even if users are uninterested in the website architecture, they must navigate the LMS and access the materials, even if they are unsure where everything is.
It is important to have a good reason for using a path-based approach, but for this specific case, we believe they should use location-based breadcrumbs that reflect the hierarchical structure of the platform. However, a case can be made for student projects where path-based breadcrumbs could be preferable. They show the user’s navigation history and may differ depending on the path taken to reach a specific page. But how do you tell them apart?

To address this shift in the UI, it’s essential to make the distinction between the two breadcrumb types clear to users. This can be done with a simple visual technique of using a colon at the end of one of the breadcrumbs, making it easier for users to recognize the type of breadcrumb they are looking at.

If your users are lost and hungry for guidance, our Breadcrumbs UX Best Practices article offers a feast for the senses.

This is the short video version summarizing the key UX gold of our full design session on YouTube.

The P&P crew swarms around UX problems from all around the world, and the narrative thread between them. They are all UX problems that happen in enterprise software. With minimal context, we work on the problem as a team, apply our advanced interaction expertise and come up with a solution (a hypothesis on solving the problem 😛). It’s like looking over the shoulder of someone at work, but better!