Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015
Worst Web Sites
Ugliest / Worst Business Web Sites of 2009, But You Can Learn Something From Them
Ugliest / Worst Business Web Sites of 2009
Ugliest / Worst Business Web Sites to Navigate in 2009
Ugliest / Worst Web Sites of 2009: Honorary Winners
Ugliest / Worst Over The Top Web Sites of 2009
Ugliest / Worst Non-Profit Web Sites of 2009
Ugliest / Worst Web Pages of the Decade
Gorgeous Websites From The
Late 90's To Inspire You — If You
Have No Taste
Web Redesign Checklists
Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015
Daily Sucker - Current Examples of Bad Design
Subscribe to RSS feed
More Bad Web Design Techniques
Stupid Versions of WPTS Home Page
Mystery Meat Navigation
A now-defunct article had a great definition of MMN:
Mystery meat navigation (also abbreviated MMN) is a term coined and popularized by author, web designer, and usability analyst Vincent Flanders to describe user interfaces (especially in web sites) in which it is inordinately difficult for users to discern the destinations of navigational hyperlinks—or, in severe cases, even to determine where the hyperlinks are. The typical form of MMN is represented by menus composed of unrevealing icons that are replaced with explicative text only when the mouse cursor hovers over them.
Flanders adopted the epithet mystery meat because, like the unidentifiable processed meat products historically served in many American public school cafeterias, MMN is unfathomable to the casual observer. Before conceiving the term mystery meat navigation, Flanders temporarily described the phenomenon as Saturnic navigation, a phrase named for the Saturn Corporation, whose web site formerly served as a high-profile example of this web usability problem.
Speaking of the Saturn Corporation, here's a video explaining the example that caused me to coin the term:
MMN is very seductive — it looks cool and it's used on sites that win design awards. Because there's no long strings of text, MMN makes the page look "cleaner" because there's more white space.
Why MMN is really bad. When you drive down the road, you don't see road signs that wait for you to get near them before they tell you what they say (mouse over this image for an example). Well, now that I think about it, Seattle has a lot of MMN; nevertheless, it's still a very bad concept.
I hope that the above image demonstration makes it perfectly clear why MMN sucks more than a Kirby vacuum cleaner. It's stupid, stupid, stupid — and dangerous.
Examples of Mystery Meat Navigation
Because of length issues, I've had to break the examples into multiple parts.
Recent Examples of Mystery Meat Navigation
Big Corporations or Classic Examples of Mystery Meat
Music, Movie and Art Mystery Meat
Web Designer Mystery Meat
Coda
Digital Imagery© copyright 2002 PhotoDisc, Inc., where applicable.
