Mystery meat navigation caused a bit of a stir in the office last week when Nick (our Director of Digital) took a look at an IA document and announced 'well, overall it works but that menu [points] is a bit mystery meat' -and then he walked off. After a few minutes of silence one brave soul then asked the question 'what do you mean mystery meat?'. So what does it mean.
Mystery meat is a phrase that originates from the early days of IA to describe anything where the meaning or target (in the case of a menu item) is unknown - a mystery. Mystery meat itself is a phrase to describe good old fashioned school cafeteria fare such as 'meat curry' and 'meat pizza'. Where the 'meat' could stand for anything from chicken to duck (or worse, depending on the school you went to). In web design terms then mystery meat is used to describe any part of the page or menu where the end user is left guessing as to the content, link target or relevance until they have performed some prescribed action. A good example is any site where you get images of things (not icons per se) that represent menu links - the image may be completely unrelated to the content/meaning of the target page.
Typically, mystery meat rears its ugly head when pure designers get to have a go at putting together a web design without the input of an information architect and so add beautifully designed, yet experientially poor images in place of good old fashioned content.
If you of any good example of mystery meat then please, let me know!
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