Super Tooltips

re: Super Tooltips

Andreas Häber — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 18:26:17 GMT

Based on the pictures this looks like a _great_ evolution of the good, old tooltips.

re: Super Tooltips

Mike — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 18:44:14 GMT

Awsome stuff. I can't believe how good Office 12 is looking...

re: Super Tooltips

Brad Corbin — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 18:45:04 GMT

I don't know whether to celebrate, or rant that this wasn't done years ago!

Great new feature, and I would think that even expert users should benefit from this functionality.

I'm increasingly impressed how the Office 12 team really seems to understand some of the difficulties of working with earlier versions. Its about time that someone did a radical re-thinking of how the fundamental interface works, instead of just falling back on "time-tested" techniques. (Which apparently weren't all that great anyway!!)

re: Super Tooltips

Dominic Self — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 18:53:50 GMT

Am I the only one bothered by "shows arrows to indicate what cells affect the value of the currently selected cell" when it should clearly be *which* cells? ;-)

re: Super Tooltips

Wayne — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 19:25:54 GMT

Absolutely awesome. This feature in itself should reduce the number of helpdesk calls users place.

Keep up the good work :)

re: Super Tooltips

Helen — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 19:28:08 GMT

Lovely.

As with all great ideas, it seems so obvious once you've thought of it. Of course tooltips should have pictures! Why hasn't this been done before?! ;-)

re: Super Tooltips

Tom Winter — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 19:35:40 GMT

Two things for the super tool tips:
1. Make sure the "Press F1 for more help" is a click-able hyperlink that opens the help file. When people are moving the mouse over the buttons, they are focused on using the mouse. Having to press F1 switches them over to the keyboard.
2. You said about people not liking the big tooltips and it covering up the ribbon. It may also cover up the document that I'm working on, which I may need to see while searching for the right command to use on it. Maybe but a little X in the upper right corner that closes super tooltips for that trip to the ribbon.

Otherwise, very nice!

re: Super Tooltips

(6) — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 19:47:24 GMT

I've been entirely reworking the UI for the product I work on. I can't believe how many of "my innovations" are now in Office 12. It's good to know that I'm on the right track, just a pity my boss will think I've been copying! :)

Keep up the good work!

re: Super Tooltips

James Schend — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 19:51:00 GMT

It's a good idea (6) (if that is your real name!), but you can't click a tooltip... they disappear when you try to move your mouse over them! (By design of course.)

Still, he has a point about moving focus from the mouse to the keyboard. I wonder if there's another way.

re: Super Tooltips

PatriotB — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 20:26:29 GMT

This looks really promising. How about dialog box controls -- will they have super tooltips too?

Also, it would be great if these constructs could be fed back to the Windows team that works on the Windows tooltip control. That way they could create easy mechanisms for any developer to add a "Press F1 for help" subsection, etc.

re: Super Tooltips

raul — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 20:51:38 GMT

On disabled tooltips, why not include a button or a link to do what you are saying. For example instead of just saying "To enable this feature, upgrade the document by selecting "Upgrade". Why not just include a simple way to do what you are explaining.

If this is a problem because of tooltips disappearing when you mouse over them, you might at least offer the keyboard command to do whatever it is that needs to be done.

re: Super Tooltips

Michael Entin — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 21:06:10 GMT

Very very nice, but why tooltip with "upgrade the document by selecting Upgrade in File menu" when this could be a hyper-link right here doing this for user, instead of giving directions what to do?

This is what was done with Windows help files, and works very nice usually.

re: Super Tooltips

Abigail — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 21:13:15 GMT

Dominic: Nope, I'm with you!

James: Some tooltips are already clickable. For example, type =(Sum(... in an Excel cell; you can drag around and click in the formula tooltip. That's been around a while. So it shouldn't be hard to make the help links clickable, and I second you that it's a good idea.

re: Super Tooltips

Scott Yost — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 21:57:27 GMT

These tooltips are one of my favorite features in the O12 beta. It really makes all the features more discoverable.

re: Super Tooltips

Johnny Pixel Pusher — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 23:17:36 GMT

I think these are great - I just hope they're not a substitute for good design...

re: Super Tooltips

Dan McCarty — Sat, 03 Dec 2005 01:21:46 GMT

"I mentioned in my article on help that one of the problems I perceive today is that there is no formal link between the user interface and the help system."

I think it's safe to say that Office help these days is worse than its ever been. Ever. It's been one long slide ever since the days of printed manuals. (At least in a printed book you had to get it right because you didn't get a SP1.)

Whether it was high-level management's decision to make help an IE window so they could tie IE closer to the OS or whether it was some other reason, help is just terrible these days. I agree with your other posters: Office97 was probably the last decent help system, and these days I cringe before pressing F1 and waiting half a minute (on a top of the line system) for help to cough to life and bash my app window so it can squeeze itself into an impossibly narrow column.

Your supertips might be a step in the right direction, but Office help in general has a long way to go just to get back to where it was. I'm looking forward to seeing the final product's help system, but I've been disappointed enough to know not to hold my breath.

re: Super Tooltips

Andrew Eberhard — Sat, 03 Dec 2005 02:23:09 GMT

Wow! I asked you to take credit for what I thought was the best help-related improvement in Office 12 (which I'd seen only in some of your previous screenshots) and you blew me away. I'm dying to do the "mom" test with these. ;-)

re: Super Tooltips

Minh Nguyễn — Sat, 03 Dec 2005 03:10:57 GMT

First of all, is Office going to keep calling these “ScreenTips”, even though people seem to be calling them tooltips these days?

Second, I think I read before about tooltips in another product (on the Mac, perhaps?) that started out as the standard tooltip at first, but expanded to be more verbose after you kept your mouse over the toolbar item for awhile. This would be helpful if you already knew what the Cut button does, for instance, but you needed to find the button by hovering around, since (just as an example) the button doesn’t currently have a text label on it.

When you’re hovering over a bunch of toolbar buttons to find the one you’re looking for, you’d be content with getting a tooltip that just says Cut, because you already know what Cut does. But these large, very descriptive tooltips will get in the way, because your eyes might automatically focus on that colorful help icon in the tooltip.

If the user doesn’t know what Cut does, then they could easily keep the mouse over the button for a second or two, and as they’re about to scratch their head in bewilderment, the tooltip expands into something more useful for them.

re: Super Tooltips

Will — Sat, 03 Dec 2005 03:47:02 GMT

I think the answer to making clickable links in the tooltips so as not to make people reach for the keyboard or go to other menus is simple: the right mouse button. Just have a context menu where the first option is "hide tooltip", the second "help on this feature", the third any links from the feature such as "upgrade the document", and then "customise" or whatever else you were designing under that.

And how about an option where you can set the delay before tooltips appear? It would be useful to make it so that people unfamiliar with the interface can find this info quicker, or keep it out of the way for people who don't like it.

re: Super Tooltips

David — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 01:12:50 GMT

The tooltips look great.

Something I've been wondering about these and the other new controls in Office - will Microsoft be making these publically available so other software can use the controls? I know some previous versions of Office haven't made their new UI controls available, so people write controls that emulate the behaviour etc... it just seems a bit messy. It would be really great if the UI libraries were separately installable as an OS patch or something, and any app could use them.

re: Super Tooltips

Paul — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 03:47:53 GMT

If the right click opened a context menu it could then be used for 'show me' or 'take me there' (primarily for the disabled options scenario) type actions. If it were 'smart' enough you could learn from the behaviour of the user, i.e. initialy display the extended tooltip after a short delay, if the user constantly waits for the extended tooltip in the magority of cases then display it automatically.

re: Super Tooltips

Orion Adrian — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 17:18:04 GMT

A couple of things:

1) Please use the same delay mechanism that's in place today for these shortcuts. Please don't use a two-stage mechanism.

2) Please don't include an option for turning these off. Options should be used for real needs, not just placating people who don't like change. Though this requires you be very careful. I was glad Clippy could be turned off because he was just annoying. Besides your options dialog is just getting silly in size.

3) As for mechanisms for activiting content within the tooltip, you did a good job. Unfortunately since the only action for creating these tooltips is onmouseover you're pretty much out of luck. While you could go with right click, that would require you to change the default behavior or expand upon it. I'm not sure that's it's intuitive either since you won't be right-clicking on the tooltip, but rather on the button that shows the tooltip.

4) Great job.

re: Super Tooltips

Universalis — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 18:34:05 GMT

"Have you ever tried to use a command that was disabled and couldn't figure out why it was grayed out?"

We put just this feature in Cardbox 3.0 about eighteen months ago. I'm glad you're doing it too and I hope that it'll become standard in the software industry. That way people will expect it and we won't keep having to tell them "why is the command disabled? Move your mouse onto it and Cardbox will tell you".

re: Super Tooltips

Frederick van Amstel — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 19:11:09 GMT

I hope you´ll include the keyboard shortcuts inside the super tooltips too. Maybe the hint can be next to the "press f1 for more help".

re: Super Tooltips

Lorraine — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 21:18:52 GMT

I love these Super Tooltips! What an enhancement. I have many people who just refuse to look in Help but with these tips so convenient, they are bound to use them.

What would even be better is to have a "Show Me" or "watch a video" to show people a short multimedia clip of exactly how to use it. What a training tool that would be!

re: Super Tooltips

Alessandro Perilli — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 14:03:28 GMT

The feature is very good but I bet there is a way to further improve:
what if users can had a short note at the end of the Super Tooltip?

The first part of it contains the description Microsoft decided to put on, the second (just below) can contain a custom description from the user.

So if I frequently use an Office command for some particular tasks which require a precise order of accomplishment (or a particular attention to some details) I could write it on the Super Tooltip and be always aware of it.

Another example: a foreign language user (let's say Italian like me) forced to use an english Office version, can add a small italian description for the most used features.

This is also a convenient way to train new users while doing training on the job: the skilled user add some useful comments to certain features so the newbie user is aware of some things when using it.

re: Super Tooltips

Ryan Pollack — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 19:49:28 GMT

Hi Jensen, my name is Ryan Pollack. I'm a technical writer for LabVIEW, a graphical programming language developed by National Instruments. We deal with issues surrounding tooltips (we call it Context Help) all the time, so I found your blog post interesting.

I and several other writers maintain a blog at http://lvtechspeak.blogspot.com/ where I talked about this feature this morning. Just thought I'd let you know. I'd love to have your comments. In particular, I am curious about the phrase "This is the right feature to use if you want to ___________" you mention in the BetaNews article. We do it a different way in LabVIEW; has your research suggested this phrasing is more beneficial to users?

re: Super Tooltips

Denis Basaric — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 00:34:10 GMT

Indeed very nice feature. I think this is one of the high value usability features that one can add to application since in my experience most of users “browse” through the product by checking tooltips and trying things rather than reading documentation. And who can blame them, discovering and exploring application interactively is certainly more fun than reading the manual.

I am sure that lot of people will want to provide same in their applications so I just posted on my blog preview of our "Super Tooltip" component for VS.NET

http://www.devcomponents.com/blog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=fcd8a7d4-0b1d-417e-9d5d-5207846eae9b

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