Material Design and the Mystery Meat Navigation Problem

In March 2016, Google updated Material Design to add bottom navigation bars to its UI library. This new bar is positioned at the bottom of an app, and contains 3 to 5 icons that allow users to navigate between top-level views in an app.

Sound familiar? That’s because bottom navigation bars have been a part of iOS’s UI library for years (they’re called tab bars in iOS).

Bottom navigation bars are a better alternative to the hamburger menu, so their addition into Material Design should be good news. But Google’s version of bottom navigation bars has a serious problem: mystery meat navigation.

Whether you’re an Android user, designer, or developer, this should trouble you.

What’s mystery meat navigation, and why’s it so bad?

Mystery meat navigation is a term coined in 1998 by Vincent Flanders of the famous website Web Pages That Suck. It refers to buttons or links that don’t explain to you what they do. Instead, you have to click on them to find out.

(The term “mystery meat” originates from the meat served in American public school cafeterias that were so processed that the type of animal they came from is no longer discernible.)