Re: [Usability]<What's this?> button

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

On Tue, 2002-11-19 at 14:29, Reinout van Schouwen wrote:

> You mean something like this? :
> http://www.millennium-technology.com/default.nsf/8525608c005e322585255d7c00545af7/8a60914055ec7300852564150071a4fb?OpenDocument

Or good old-fashioned Macintosh balloon help, I guess:
http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/mac/HIGuidelines/HIGuidelines-240.html

but IIRC this feature was dropped for OSX after years of sterling
service.

Unfortunately, the trouble with any schemes like this is that they live
or die on the strength of the help they provide.  As somebody said
earlier, it's frustrating if only some of the controls in a dialog have
such a tooltip, or if the tip for a control labelled "Option Blah" just
says "Select this to enable Option Blah", which is no use at all.  One
or two bad experiences like that and the user will never turn the
feature on again, even if every other control in every other application
on their desktop has the most helpful tooltips imaginable :)

So my pessimistic guess is that an idea like this would take too much
effort to ever work really well in GNOME, given that not all GNOME
hackers are known for their dedication to writing documentation, and a
fair number of the rest of us are just crap at it ;)

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems