unity-design team mailing list archive

[Diego Moya <turingt@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 21 September 2010 15:57, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:

>
>> For the same reason operating systems don't have visible controls for
>> configuring the appearance of tooltips. If they're designed right, they
>> should be below the threshold of triviality. If a substantial proportion
>> of users want to configure them, there's something wrong that we need to
>> fix.
>>
>
>
Moreover: not even a design as simple as tooltips can be got right once and
for all. For example Microsoft did a complete overhaul of their tooltips
engine for Office 2007, enabling giant tooltips that contain snippets of the
help files. The new tooltips work much better than the old ones in that
context (a giant software suite full of obscure features) thus proving that
even a simple, general design can be enhanced for particular use cases.

(And for the curious, yes, the Office tooltips allow for some configuration,
if only for nostalgics to select the old behavior).