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Mystery Meat Navigation

Mystery Meat Navigation (MMN) is something that is one of my major pet peeves. I run into at least one new site a day that has Mystery Meat Navigation. Lets take a look at a really bad old site that has Mystery Meat Navigation and once you see how bad this method can be. You will be more wary of using Mystery Meat Navigation in your next design.

Reggaereport

Look at the left Menu on this site. What do you see? Mystery Meat Navigation!! Now quickly! What do this icons do? Do they help you find useful information on the site? Or do they confuse you? Now if you were able to tell those links are: Irie 'Tings, World a'Reggae News, New Releases, CD Reviews, Crucial Cuts, Photo Album, Fan Mail, About Us, Advertise; without looking at the source code. Thats great. Granted the old designer put alt tags in his Mystery Meat Navigation, but they aren't working in Firefox. Avoid doing your next cool menu with Mystery Meat Navigation if you can.

Labels:alt tags, MMN, Mystery Meat Navigation

Posted by thedudedean on Jul 28, 2007 in Blab | 4 comments

FallenAngel on Jul 28, 2007

I think the moral of the story's that mystery meat navigation is most definitely not cool.

Mystery navigation IIRC was a common complaint in Steve Krug's "Don't Make Me Think" - an excellent guide as to how to design sites that people can actually use.

jezca on Jul 29, 2007

yes... MMN.. not cool

ZsaZsa on Jul 29, 2007

They are very exclusive and don't want just anybody using their site. It's a super-secret screening technique, I'm sure. I will have to start using MMN for my more exclusive clients.

thedudedean on Jul 30, 2007

ZsaZsa make sure you make the site in flash so that way none of the text shows up in Google as well.