On Oct 20, 2008, at 7:49 PM, MilesTogoe wrote:
Krzysztof Kosiński wrote:
A tooltip is a rather weak outside indication, as it requires a mouse dwell to discover it.
Oh give me a break. Is this some sort of troll? The first intuitive thing I do for a button or widget I can't remember or don't know, is to dwell over it (for all of a micro second) and read the tooltip. In fact, if there is no tooltip, I'm quite unhappy since I often don't remember the different functionalities. So to the rest of the crew, keep up the nice tooltips!
Actually it is a poor solution for a great number of users out there. Some people try to check for tips, but some others (who even have been using computers for some time) don't.
Tooltips also are sometimes problematic for input devices such as tablets. Even when using a drawing tablet's "mouse", it's possible for the hi-res input to jitter to much for tips to be triggered. With my Wacom Intuos, for example, I often have to move the cursor over a widget and then *very* carefully lift my stylus straight up in order to get a stable "float" to trigger a tip.
Counting on tooltips also goes counter to the concept of discoverability. The best UI signals it's use from how it looks, and new users are drawn to just move "things" to get a program to work.
I'm not saying that tooltips are not good, just that *depending* on tooltips is poor UI design.