Re: Tooltips On Menus

No, that doesn't prove your point. If anything, it weakens it. When
something is still around for years after it's been introduced, there's a
reason it's still being used in today's apps. If it was a bad idea or
design, it'd have died years ago. This one hasn't. You don't think MS and
others would have removed it if everyone were saying "that's the dumbest
and most worthless thing I've ever seen"?

Actually looking back, this particular GUI gem originated not in 3.1 but in
various DOS apps. I think MS have a tendency not to change GUIs over a
length of time not because it's necessarily good, but because of constantly
whiny users who hate change. Just look at the flack they took over the
ribbon bar in Office 2007 which completely replaced the menu system.
Admittedly I hated it as well, but after using it for a while I've found it
a lot more productive. Making progress is painful, particularly when you
have that many users.

IMO, if you want to provide menu tips in your app, putting them in a
status bar is the way to do it, if for no other reason than because it's
still the standard.

There are many GUI standards that have been re-written over time because
something better and more effective comes along. ToolTips didn't even exist
back in the Windows 3.1 days, so the standard simply had to be status bar
text back then.

Even if you ("you" in a generic sense) don't like it, so what? It's easily
ignored and non-intrusive (as you ["you" as in Alex this time] even showed
by saying you've never noticed it in IE), unlike a tooltip would be.

It's precisely for this reason that it becomes useless. It's not important
that *I* didn't notice it - as an experienced user I happen to have some
idea as to what the "Save" menu item is going to do. A novice user however
may well need some coaching on various menu options, and it's when *they*
don't notice the description tucked way down at the bottom of the window
that it causes a problem. The very thing the description is supposed to do
becomes useless if a user doesn't notice it. At that point it's just
wasting screen space rather than doing something useful.

Frankly, I find tooltips frequently annoying. I absolutely hate those
immediately appearing and never-disappearing tooltips that follow the
mousepointer wherever it goes.

As do I, but I've only ever seen them on amateurish applications. What I
stated earlier in this thread is that a tooltip that appears beside the menu
item when the mouse hovers (i.e. pauses for a length of time) over that item
is far more useful than text that instantly appears in the status bar and is
likely to go unnoticed. Another reason I believe it's often ignored is that
the text changes the instant the mouse moves to the next menu item - as one
part of the screen is highlighted (the menu item), another part changes in
perfect sync, reducing the likelihood that it will catch the user's eye.

Placement and use is obviously important - a tooltip that obscures other
menu items, has too much text, closes too soon, opens too quickly etc is
fast going to become an annoyance, but IMO if it's well implemented it's far
more powerful than a throw-back to the 16bit days like status bar text.

As I also pointed out earlier in the thread, most Windows users know that
pausing the mouse over a button or option can often yield some additional
information in the form of popup text. This is *also* now a standard, and a
far more intuitive one than status bar text. The whole reason the
status-bar text nonsense began was because there was no better way of
providing immediate context-sensitive guidance to a user. Now there is,
it's called a tooltip, and in terms of standardisation it's been around
since Windows 95.

Auto-complete/suggest text boxes, collapsible frames and embedded hyperlink
controls were not around 15 years ago, along with probably a dozen other
well used modern GUI controls. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be used to
replace some of the archaic leftovers from Windows 3.1 & DOS when they're
better suited to the task, no matter what the standard was 15yrs ago. If
it's more intuitive and it makes sense from an interface POV, then I'm not
particularly bothered how Windows 3.1 used to do it.



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