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Comment by hkarthik | Hacker News Reader

This is a common problem that UI professionals often refer to as "Mystery Meat Navigation". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation

It was pretty common during the 90s when screen resolutions were really low and preserving space was a big deal. We're seeing it again now because of mobile friendly responsive designs dealing with the same issue.

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I'm curious how many people browse github from their smartphones. Right now I'm on my desktop and see a pretty column of unlabeled icons, right next to three inches of unused whitespace between the icons and the edge of the frame. It's a somewhat inefficient use of space...

Probably very few. The site is currently very, very difficult to use on anything smaller than a tablet.

I use the github app on my smartphone, it's quite handy though I don't know that I'd what to do hardcore source browsing or editing on it.

I'm now seeing three inches of whitespace between the footer and the body...

That takes me back. The "Web Pages That Suck" book was what got me into web design and programming.

Unfortunately, while I bet almost all designers would recognize that mystery meat is bad in the classic 90's context of using it on a homepage, its become acceptable with these sorts of interior toolbars.

So while github is not using it on the project homepage - probably because they recognize it would be MM and be awful - they are using it deeper down.

The number of times I've hit GMail's 'Spam' button rather than 'Trash' is ridiculous. Whether due to the icons or the placing of them next door to each other with no visual (apart from icon or text-label) distinction...

What would you recommend they did here?

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