[Sigia-l] Rollover Question (Web 2.0)

[David (Heller) Malouf]

I think of tooltips as guiding "learnability".

I think it nearly impossible to come up with icons that are meaningful
to everyone.
Tooltips have reached the point of ubiquitous convention for many
different persona types (not all), so, using them to aid in learning
what icons are totally makes sense to me.

In fact, there are way too many sites and software products that DON'T
use them when they really need them.

I understand what Todd is saying about not relying on them, but when I
think about where I use them, I can't imagine the system being
learnable without them.

One way around that of course is to just use labels next to your
actionable icons, no?
And then give options to remove the labels later--ala browser toolbars.

I find that method though to be a bit heavy handed for applications
that are more transactional and interactive. I barely use the toolbar
on my browser except for one button (Back) and maybe the "Tab" button
in Firefox though I think I use <ctrl-T> more. Imagine the Word
toolbar filled with labels under or next to everything. It would be a
mess. Even in the more elaborate "ribbon" of Office 2007 (highly
recommend people downloading this puppy and playing with it) they
can't put lables on everything.

Anyway, to me tooltips are a part of good design, not a crutch of bad
design. Because good design of complex applications requires more than
intuition, it requires learning through discoverability.

-- dave