4 ms·
Tooltips need a delay, and then they need to skip it
- phyzome 2mo agoI ran into the same problem about 20 years ago when implementing hover-based dropdown menus on a website. It was only about 10 lines of JS and a couple global variables but I was the only person who understood it. :-P (These days I would have included more comments.) Naturally, there was a fallback to pure CSS menus, because we weren't barbarians.
- dylan604 2mo agowhat did the JS provide that the CSS solve wasn't the only solve?
- jcranmer 2mo agoNot OP, but my guess is things like timing delay--20 years ago, CSS animations and transitions weren't a thing yet, especially since 20 years ago also puts us in the era of IE6 being a major browser.
- phyzome 2mo agoExactly. And on the browser front we had to contend with not only IE6, but IE5.5 on Mac, which was its own special beast.
- altacc 2mo ago> only about 10 lines of JS Ah, the good old days when we wrote JS function to do something, or copied from dHTMLZone. These days the first 10 lines of JS is loading hundreds of lines of JS libraries. (Yep, I'm an old man yelling at clouds!)
- phyzome 2mo agoIt's still how I write JS. But I don't do professional frontend work. (That's by choice.)
- compiler-guy 2mo agoI greatly appreciate this attention to detail, and there isn't enough of this in the world. For example, in Visual Studio popups on hover happen so fast you can barely select anything, or you end up clicking on the popup instead of selecting a word.
- gblargg 2mo agoOpus Magnum suffers from this. It feels like punishment for taking the most direct route to get the cursor where I want it.
- wang_li 2mo agoIf there is a primary UI element on screen that the user can interact with and moving the mouse towards that causes a secondary, alternative, UI element to appear, the second element needs an active modifier key to bring it up. Tooltips and such are total trash and get in the way of usability. If you have something important then put it on the screen to begin with don't have it randomly jump in front of the user who is already mid action with something else.
- nlawalker 2mo agoMy favorite is the info icons that show a tooltip on hover, but if you click them, they disappear the tip if it’s showing and never show it if it hasn’t appeared yet.
- wging 2mo agoYears and years ago, there was an article about the way Amazon.com's menu dropdown worked. It had the same spark (of careful attention to user behavior and needs): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5330998 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5330998 / https://bjk5.com/post/44698559168/breaking-down-amazons-mega-dropdown https://bjk5.com/post/44698559168/breaking-down-amazons-mega...
- halostatue 2mo agoThe pure CSS version seems more interesting to me: https://blog.master.dev/delayed-then-instant-tooltips-with-html-css-alone/ https://blog.master.dev/delayed-then-instant-tooltips-with-h...
- nayroclade 2mo agoChris Coyier also posted a version using only HTML/CSS, no JS: https://blog.master.dev/delayed-then-instant-tooltips-with-html-css-alone/ https://blog.master.dev/delayed-then-instant-tooltips-with-h...
- bautista144 2mo agoI want free games to play dreamcast burning class
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- hurrell 2mo agoI think I would describe this as an example of hysteresis. Neat! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteresis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteresis
- xg15 2mo agoInterestingly, there are more use cases for hysteresis in UI design, e.g. it was famously used in nested menus in Windows: https://www.mackido.com/Interface/hysteresis.html https://www.mackido.com/Interface/hysteresis.html I think there was also an article about it on The Old New Thing, but I can't seem to find it anymore.
- lelandfe 2mo agoLike the HN post we're commenting on, so too does this example also get regurgitated every few years. Find modern examples by Googling "menu safe triangle." Here's one from 5 days ago https://www.framer.com/blog/cursor-trajectory/ https://www.framer.com/blog/cursor-trajectory/ > I asked the Framer Agent to fix it, and within minutes it had built and applied what I now call trajectory-based menu aim
- anonymars 2mo agoIs this the one? https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20080619-00/?p=21903/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20080619-00/?p=21...
- thaumasiotes 2mo ago>> 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?
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- goda90 2mo agoWhat about using mouse velocity? If the mouse is changing position at a certain rate, don't show the tooltips.
- jareklupinski 2mo agoi only show tooltips if you wiggle the mouse cursor over an element
- thoughtbefore 2mo agoOn 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
- jay_kyburz 2mo agoPerhaps I'm just an old grump, but I prefer the No Delay version in the example. I like predictable, consistent, and fast.
- broken-kebab 2mo agoSame. To me exactly delayed version is annoying. Non-obvious rules which guide behavior make it feel like there's a bug.
- denislexic 2mo ago[dead]
- brixie 2mo agoThis looks it's describing the same technique as the last example in https://emilkowal.ski/ui/you-dont-need-animations https://emilkowal.ski/ui/you-dont-need-animations (and that whole post is worth a read, I think, if you found this interesting). It's such a small detail that I wouldn't have otherwise noticed (because I don't build animations, so it doesn't cross my mind), but now that I know about it, I think about it all the time.
- self_awareness 2mo agoHilarious. Web devs discovering UX from Win95. What's next, 3d buttons?
- ProxCoques 2mo agoI 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.
- quacked 2mo agoI 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
- nxc18 2mo agoI 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)
- thaumasiotes 2mo agoWell, 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.
- ProxCoques 2mo agoIt 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.
- hinkley 2mo agoChesterton's Fence. Why on earth do we need this thing here? Oh, that's why.
- silon42 2mo agoRewrite will be better /s
- hinkley 2mo agoThe rewrite is better! For the engineers who are planning to have a new job in a year. They get a whole year of being able to deflect all questions about how far behind schedule we are and how many of the customers want to burn the building down. It's a great gig if you can get it. Horrible for the users and investors, of course, but great for the engineers.
- baxtr 2mo agoIn its most concise version, Chesterton’s Fence states the following: “Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place.”
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- projektfu 2mo agoRaskin left Apple in 1982.
- twelvechairs 2mo ago
- jameshart 2mo agoFeels like the delay also gets implemented into displaying the tooltip on tap on a touch interface which is probably an error.
- zx8080 2mo agoIs this post text claude-generated? Very creepy to read around the solution section. It reads like the agent report.
- jobuildsstuff 2mo ago[flagged]
- Prydown 2mo agoWindows taskbar has done this forever and I never once noticed it consciously. Good catch.
- kazinator 2mo agoBasically, have a global temperature. When the pointer is in something that has a tooltip, the temperature rises. Otherwise it cools (possibly at a different rate). A tooltip is shown only when the pointer is in bounds, and the temperature is above a certain threshold.
- cush 2mo agoI was disappointed to see the new web popover api doesn't have this basic usability feature built in
- doctor_phil 2mo agoWouldn't it make sense to use mouse movement for this. Display the tooltip only if the cursor is not moving (same position two frames in a row).
- forestrywat 2mo agoTooltips pop up in many cases where there's no more being used. Tabbing through items, for example.
- xxs 2mo agoa rather poor idea - esp. the frame part, mouse movement is not related to the display frame (rate). The latter can be rather high, e.g. 240Hz which is 8ms. Having a set delay and be in the boundaries (and not leaving it) is a significantly easier solution and easier to test too. Overall the delay in tooltips (and configurable) has been a feature since the 90s (could set the delay in millis in some UI frameworks)
- maya335 2mo ago[flagged]
- chrismorgan 2mo agoThe example shown at the top is really bad. “Before (Without the delay of 200ms)” shows obvious delay in appearance. I think this is because of the very inappropriate fade-in. “After (With the delay of 200ms & instant tooltips)” doesn’t show the instant behaviour at all, only one tooltip.
- amelius 2mo agoEven with that fix, the UX is still broken on touchscreens ...
- aequitas 2mo agoTo bad apple abandoned force touch. Would be nice to drag your finger over the buttons to see the tooltips and push down harder to actually push the button. With haptic feedback of course so you feel the edge of the button, like the magic touchpad does for clicks.
- k__ 2mo agoI'm always amazed by solutions for user interactions. I once built a Bomberman clone that had control issues. The first iteration of the controls were clunky, because I only checked if a player was touching a block in the direction they wanted to move and if there was, I reset the position. Move down, hit block, stop. After a bit of experimenting I checked if a player was halfway behind or ahead of a block and added perpendicular motion after resetting the position. That way the player would glide around the blocks. Move down, hit block, stop, move left or right until moved around the block. That change alone made the game 100x more fun.
- Gravityloss 2mo agoIn FPS maps like Quake you only realized how much invisible clip blocks the map makers put in once you play an amateur map that doesn't have them. You hit things, get stuck and can even get crushed and die. Or you can try and play an early version of some popular multiplayer map that doesn't have them and it's way less playable. A lot of new creators of course will not believe you if you tell you have to do these affordances. I once tested a person's multiplayer map where a door had a central lip that crushed you if you entered off-center. I told them that it should be fixed, but the answer was "you should always go through doors through the center". It's some sort of very enticing idea of purity. "My map will only have real architecture and no affordances." In the end it will self correct.
- jtrn 2mo agoTooltip are useful, but i usualy avoid them since they dont work well with touch devices. Web-dev primary tho.
- bluedino 2mo agoI wish the Teams emoji/reaction popup would not come up so often. I have to intention place my mouse cursor somewhere that won't trigger it. I don't need to react to every message. I'd rather be able to read them without something blocking them.
- hedora 2mo agoThat sounds like engagement hacking. Someone’s promotion packet probably brags about the number of emojis sent. On a related note: I refuse to install teams, and have never seen an emoji popup in the web video chat thing.
- cbondurant 2mo agoI think I can tell just how good a design this is by the fact that the moment I interacted with the demo it just felt right. To the extent that I had to focus harder to really recognize that it was doing exactly as described. Truly, good design is design that goes unnoticed.
- gazook89 2mo agoTwo things: First, it’s funny how browsers finally get to the point where good html tooltips can be done with just HTML/CSS via Anchor Positioning and Popover APIs, eliminating the need for JS for tooltips. But then there is a “one more thing” that pulls JS right back into it. Second, I think the tooltip context could be applied to “tooltip groups”, so it’s not a check to see if the whole page is “warm”, but whether a group is warm.
- MachineMan 2mo agotooltips are important. So important I think they need a dedicated shortcut key, because 1 key to speed up your entire workflow forever and lower the learning curve of new software is worth it. 1 key to highlight all elements with tooltips at the same time, then hoover over it. No delays, no searching and they need to explain concepts beyond a few words so you can get rid of the entire help manual also.
- bgro 2mo agoAm I the only one who doesn’t like things popping up, sliding in, expanding and contracting and lazy loading trash website design? How do you think tooltip hover works on mobile? Why do we need to explain what a thing is or does on every site? Are JavaScript devs seeing video games and the key takeaway is everybody loves the tutorial where they’re told W moves forward? Or are they doing wacky JavaScript devs stuff like making pageup forward because it contains word “up” so fixed another bug. Then patting themselves on the back. Just display the text information. Let me print it. Use consistent designs. Don’t intercept my clicks. I could do an hour long standup rant just about how you guys need to STOP intercepting my clicks. In fact I’ll narrow it down to just Microsoft. They continuously find new ways to block and obstruct clicks. Once windows toast notifications got mostly fixed they reinvented toast notifications in yet another parallel duplicate feature with Teams toasts that spawn back to back to block critical button clicks. I can’t believe even Apple has let this slip and iPhone is also subject to click blocking. What are the rest of you devs doing all day?
- sanj 2mo agoI went one step further: there's a really annoying behavior in Google Workspace where a giant popup appears if you linger over any account. I wrote an chrome extension to block them: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/google-workspace-hover-co/mpnfnonnikakdooncnhongnehecenefk?hl=en https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/google-workspace-ho...
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