In 1998, Vincent Flanders, author of the perennially amusing Web Pages that Suck, coined the phrase Mystery Meat Navigation (or MMN) for web pages which didn’t make clear the destination of a link before it was clicked on.
As you’ll already know if you went to a public school in America (I didn’t), “mystery meat” is a term for food which has been processed so much that it’s no longer clear which animal it came from. You have to try it to find out.
In the same way, mystery meat navigation emphasises design over functionality. It purposefully conceals some information because it gets in the way of being pretty. Abstract buttons replace text. I think we can agree that’s a bad move. Website navigation should be clear without the user needing to interact with it to find out where everything goes.
Tags: Design • elearning • eLearning Design • GLAD News • graphics • Instructional Design • navigation