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

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

On Thu, 2003-07-24 at 22:13, Mario Vukelic wrote:

> I think it would be much better to have sane way to, say, have a general
> setting that effects all apps, except those where I specify otherwise

As it happens this would tie in quite nicely with the way toolbar
preferences are supposed to work (according to the HIG)... there's a
desktop preference for show icons/text/both, but the user is meant to be
able to override this per-app.  In practise only a few apps do this
though, and I'm not totally convinced of its usefulness.  Or maybe I
just don't really like the way the HIG recommends it should be done.

I haven't really got my brain into gear to think about this yet, but
personally I don't ever recall being annoyed by tooltips on toolbars,
provided they're accurate.  Tooltips on dialog controls do annoy me for
some reason though, partly because I'm more likely to invoke them
accidentally, and partly because they're always a surprise when they
appear, because most dialogs don't have any.

I do find the more verbose tooltips on menus (e.g. the Applications
menu) quite useful, but their appearance blocking out other menu items 
is definitely a problem that we need to think about.

ObTooltipTip: keyboard users can show/hide the tooltip for the focused
control by pressing Ctrl+F1.

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