Purpose of Bread Crumbs

This post is basically a "c'mon, people!" post.

Above we have a screenshot of Dell's page for purchasing Limited Warranty and Service Extensions - a page that you would think Dell wants to be highly accessible for Dell computer users. Today I was there, trying to find the page where I could purchase a warranty extension for our company's server.

After about 20 minutes of fruitless clicking around the Dell website, it was only by going to Google's incredibly useful Web History feature that I was able to finally find the pages I was looking for. I ran a search in my history for [Dell warranty], and was able to find the path I had followed last week.

However, after looking at the Dell page I found, I thought, "no wonder!" Look at the bread crumbs:

You are here: USA > Small Business

I could have been anywhere in the Dell Small Business portal!

Dell is using a common device known as "bread crumbs" to help users navigate through the site. But here is the problem: BREAD CRUMBS ARE USEFUL ONLY IF THEY ACTUALLY HELP SOMEONE FIND OUT WHERE THEY ARE IN THE SITE!

You students of web usability out there may be able to give an even better solution than this, but here's my suggestion for an alternative bread crumb system:

You are here: Small Business Services > Service & Warranties > Warranty Extensions

Some other thoughts on bread crumbs, with Dell specifically in mind...

• The presence of "USA" in the bread crumb trail is of absolutely zero use to me as an American user. I'm betting that the case would be the same for a UK user viewing the UK Dell website. Perhaps the webpages could display the American flag elsewhere, with some statement like, "This is the Dell USA website. Click here for another country." Imagine that for usability.
• I understand the presence of the "Small Business" designation, but as it is currently, this is also of zero use to me, as a small business user. More descriptive classifications would greatly help the usability of the website. For example, is there a need for separation of "small business products" from "small business services"?
• Besides the issue of bread crumbs, there is the issue of making the account homepage more useful. Granted, there is probably some way in which my company could have used the Dell website in the past that would have made it easier for me to find the computer in question and purchase the needed services. But it is also likely that doing so was not obviously useful enough to go through the necessary steps. It's got to be obvious for us! Dell, you've got the time and the people - give us a website devoted to current accounts. Make it all-inclusive for us, like a bank website, so that it's obviously the place where we view ALL of our past Dell purchases, make new purchases, and manage our warranties. Dell ought to be able to use computers just as well as banks can.
  

Those are my thoughts. If Dell disagrees, well, then... they're wrong.