No one likes school dinners
I had the misfortune of finding myself on the Bombay Sapphire Gin site the other day. If you go there, be prepared for a frustrating visit.
Like far too many sites on the web, Bombay Sapphire employ the single most annoying navigation gimmick on the web - ‘School Dinner navigation’.
School Dinner navigation is not only the bane of good, usable design, but also the best named usability mishap. Quite simply, you have to ’stick your fork in the item’ (roll your mouse over the item) in order to see what it is.
School dinner navigation is the epitome of arrogant site design, a belief that the user will want to spend endless precious seconds inspecting the navigation to find out where they need to go on the web site.
This sort of thing drives me nuts. “An Interactive Experience Like No Other” the site proudly boasts. Sadly not. Far too many sites use school dinner navigation to add that ‘edge of dynamism’ to proceedings. My advice? Don’t. Let your content add the dynamism and leave any mention of school dinners back in your childhood.
December 11th, 2008 at 10:48 pm
I wouldn’t get too worked up about it. These sites have one purpose. Brand positioning. Nobody is really trying to do anything important on them are they.
They employ design firms that think they are clever to build a very pretentious site. The fact that it is difficult to use makes little difference to their bottom line.
I thought it was called ‘Mystery Meat Navigation’. It came from Web Pages that Suck back in the late 90s. it still sucks today but there are bigger things to worry about than these nothing websites.
December 12th, 2008 at 8:42 am
Yes David, I’ve always called it “Mystery Meat Navigation” too!
Thanks for your comment.