Mystery Meat Navigation: An Introduction

Here are the sites -->
Recent
Corporations
Art/Music/Film
Web Designers
Coda

Note: Some people have asked, "Where are the sites?" Well, the menu above should aim you in the right direction. Next, I've included part of Wikipedia's definition of the term, some short videos of sites who used to use MMN followed by the same links as above in a section called "More Examples of Mystery Meat Navigation."

Definition and Discussion

Click for the Definition of Mystery Meat Navigation

Wikipedia's defilnition (partial):

Mystery meat navigation (also known as MMN) is a disparaging term coined in 1998 by author and web designer Vincent Flanders to describe a visually attractive but concurrently inefficient, confusing, or abstruse user interface, usually one that is Internet-based[1]. Such interfaces lack a user-centered design, emphasizing aesthetic appearance, white space, and the concealment of relevant information over basic practicality and functionality.

The epithet "mystery meat" refers to the meat products often served in American public school cafeterias whose forms have been so thoroughly reprocessed that their exact types can no longer be identified by their appearances: like them, the methods of MMN are clear to the producer but baffling to the consumer.

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.