Re: [Usability] Disable Tooltips, what is that about?

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Thu, 24 Jul 2003, John Levon wrote:

> One of the factors I think plays a large part in people not liking
> tooltips is over-sized (even paragraph-sized !) tooltips. This
> completely subverts the non-obtrusive nature of tooltips.

I should have thought of this earlier, links about what the Human
Interface Guidelines have to say about Tooltips are included below and the
HIG clearly advises people to keep them short and to the point, so if we
see any really long tooltips it is a HIG/user inteface bug.

> I had some excellent links on tooltip design, but I appear to have lost
> them.
>
> A good tooltip should not be large enough to obscure any significant
> real estate. A rule of thumb I use is "if you feel you need punctuation,
> you don't want a tooltip". Other methods such as What's This or a
> re-design, etc. should be seriously considered.

would wanting Pango markup in a tooltip count as being unnecessary
overcomplication?
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=113592

> I do not believe there is any reasonable argument for disabling tooltips
> when the tooltip system is working satisfactorily.

This is the most important bit about tooltips in general
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/1.0/language.html#id2862813

Menu item Tooltips, reiterates the point
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/1.0/desktop-integration.html#menu-item-tooltips

as does the section Labels and Tooltips
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/1.0/toolbars.html#labels-and-tooltips

I am reminded how incredibly good the HIG is but I have a bad feeling that
the guidelines are less likely to be followed until people have a better
understand of why things should be done this way.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/