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From Alertbox’s article Breadcrumb Navigation Increasingly Useful:

In testing an e-commerce site last month, for example, one user complained: “This is missing a feature to go back to the previous page.”

I found this apparent request for a Back button puzzling, since the button was featured prominently in the browser and the person had easily used it earlier in the test session. Also, for six years, it’s been an established guideline to avoid duplicating browser functionality in the page design.

It quickly became clear, however, that the user wasn’t asking for a duplicate Back button. Elaborating on the previous complaint, she pointed to the place on the page where breadcrumbs typically appear and said she wanted the list of links to higher-level pages.

In other words, the user wanted breadcrumbs. She’d seen them before, but didn’t know what they were called, so she asked for them using words that — if taken literally — would have been easily misinterpreted.

The title of this article is so obvious it sounds like something from The Onion. But, this is from 2007 and it’s likely this user expectation is even more entrenched, and it’s an expectation that a site be useful: that the site have the helpful elements they need to move around. Even if that element reproduces browser functionality, as Nielson notes.

I’ve been building (using JavaScript and for too long), breadcrumb navigation that can work across our Network Tools, so I was happy to come across this as a reminder the work is worth it.