[Usability] Disable Tooltips, what is that about?

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

While attempting to do some User Interface review I noticed that quite a
few applictions have an option to disable tooltips.

It seems quite strange to do this on an application by application basis
and it might be something to consider doing at a desktop or even toolkit
level.  However before doing this I think that in general tooltips are a
good idea even there are clearly some implemenation details that could
stand to be improved. [1]

Users seem to find Tooltips annoying.  I did a straw poll and actually got
some sane answers (and whole lot of unhelpful "tooltips bad!" answers), in
an attempt to figure out what exactly about them was annoying.

"Tooltips are not informative enough".
How to identify when tooltips need to be improved?

"Tooltips pop up when they are not wanted".
"Tooltips obscure other information"
Perhaps the delay time needs to be looked at, and there are already some
suggestions of when tooltips should go away and not overstay their
welcome.

I would be interested if people here could help me to understand why
people dont like tooltips and what might be done about it.
(I dont think getting rid of tooltips entirely is even an option).

Sincerely

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

[1] Bug reports against gtk referring to tooltips

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=gtk%2B&bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=NEEDINFO&bug_status=REOPENED&short_desc=tips&short_desc_type=substring

shorter link to Gnome bugzilla:
http://tardis.linux.ie/1462/bugzilla.gnome.org