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Tooltips need a delay, and then they need to skip it

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Re: Tooltips need a delay, and then they need to skip it

#21

Post by quacked »

ProxCoques wrote: post #18
self_awareness wrote: post #16

Hilarious. Web devs discovering UX from Win95. What's next, 3d buttons?

I know right? It's like interaction design came and went over a period of 30 years and now we're back to the beginning again.

I spend a lot of time seething at how poorly modern software interaction is, and I've come to the belief that they basically solved most of the window-based GUI computing interactivity problems by around XP, and have just been gutting them since then.

My three most-hated modern trends

- Disappearing scroll bar with content that you have to scroll for

- Pills going across the top of the screen that are "most-used" filters instead of a real filtering menu

- Clickable text and non-clickable text appearing the same. I mean come on. Who the fuck is designing these things? That's the one I can't wrap my mind around. How can a self-respecting programmer put out a UI where the display and clickable elements look exactly the same? What are we doing man

Re: Tooltips need a delay, and then they need to skip it

#22

Post by hinkley »

ProxCoques wrote: post #17

It will never cease to amaze to me that Apple (under Jef Raskin who also wrote about this in The Humane Interface) observed and fixed problems with interactions like this in SYSTEM 6 in like 1993 or something - only for the same problem to have to be re-descovered and re-fixed decades later.

Chesterton's Fence.

Why on earth do we need this thing here?

Oh, that's why.

Re: Tooltips need a delay, and then they need to skip it

#23

Post by nxc18 »

quacked wrote: post #21
ProxCoques wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know right? It's like interaction design came and went over a period of 30 years and now we're back to the beginning again.

I spend a lot of time seething at how poorly modern software interaction is, and I've come to the belief that they basically solved most of the window-based GUI computing interactivity problems by around XP, and have just been gutting them since then. My three most-hated modern trends - Disappearing scroll bar with content that you have to scroll for - Pills going across the top of the screen that are "most-used" fil…

I think the real problem is we don’t have a native-quality UX toolkit on the web - the built in controls are just horrible. So every app has to reinvent the wheel from scratch, or use one of a few hundred (thousand) web component libraries that have all also had to reinvent the wheel from scratch (I guess a div and some text rendering isn’t scratch per se but you get my point)

Re: Tooltips need a delay, and then they need to skip it

#24

Post by broken-kebab »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #14

Perhaps I'm just an old grump, but I prefer the No Delay version in the example. I like predictable, consistent, and fast.

Same. To me exactly delayed version is annoying. Non-obvious rules which guide behavior make it feel like there's a bug.

Re: Tooltips need a delay, and then they need to skip it

#25

Post by [deleted] »

ProxCoques wrote: post #17

It will never cease to amaze to me that Apple (under Jef Raskin who also wrote about this in The Humane Interface) observed and fixed problems with interactions like this in SYSTEM 6 in like 1993 or something - only for the same problem to have to be re-descovered and re-fixed decades later.

[deleted]

Re: Tooltips need a delay, and then they need to skip it

#26

Post by projektfu »

ProxCoques wrote: post #17

It will never cease to amaze to me that Apple (under Jef Raskin who also wrote about this in The Humane Interface) observed and fixed problems with interactions like this in SYSTEM 6 in like 1993 or something - only for the same problem to have to be re-descovered and re-fixed decades later.

Raskin left Apple in 1982.

Re: Tooltips need a delay, and then they need to skip it

#27

Post by kwarcode »

thoughtbefore wrote: post #19
jareklupinski wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i only show tooltips if you wiggle the mouse cursor over an element

On a Catholic church site I designed you have to do the cross pattern with your mouse and say 3 Hail Marys to see the tooltip. There is no contact form. Only a Confession Textarea

At least the cookie popup comes with wine

Re: Tooltips need a delay, and then they need to skip it

#29

Post by thaumasiotes »

hurrell wrote: post #8

I think I would describe this as an example of hysteresis. Neat! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteresis

>> Hysteresis is the dependence of the state of a system on its history. For example, a magnet may have more than one possible magnetic moment in a given magnetic field, depending on how the field changed in the past.

How is this different from the observation that, say, a non-magnetic iron ball may have more than one possible velocity in a given gravitional field, depending on whether it was recently thrown upward or dropped from above?

Re: Tooltips need a delay, and then they need to skip it

#30

Post by thaumasiotes »

nxc18 wrote: post #23
quacked wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spend a lot of time seething at how poorly modern software interaction is, and I've come to the belief that they basically solved most of the window-based GUI computing interactivity problems by around XP, and have just been gutting them since then. My three most-hated modern trends - Disappearing scroll bar with content that you have to scroll for - Pills going across the top of the screen that are "most-used" fil…

I think the real problem is we don’t have a native-quality UX toolkit on the web - the built in controls are just horrible. So every app has to reinvent the wheel from scratch, or use one of a few hundred (thousand) web component libraries that have all also had to reinvent the wheel from scratch (I guess a div and some text rendering isn’t scratch per se but you get my point)

Well, Microsoft was interested in making it easy to develop Windows applications, and also in making it easy and pleasant to use Windows applications. They had reason to invest in learning how that could be done and in writing utilities that would let you benefit from their knowledge; doing that made more money for them.

Browsers are different. They don't really benefit from being written for, or from being used. This seems like enough to explain the difference. They provide some functionality, and giving your users a good experience is your problem, not theirs.

I feel like I've seen complaints that Apple has forgotten things it already knew about how to design a usable interface; that wouldn't be explained by this model.

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