Tag Archives: design

The Importance of Tooltip Wording

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I was in a non-technical lecture last week (on entrepreneurial idea generation) and the lecturer wanted to show us a video to kick off our session. (It was actually an amazing Steven Johnson video, Where Good Ideas Come From.)

What interested me, probably on par with the video, was the way the lecturer tried to get the volume fixed to play the video.

She was setting up the laptop, got to the Youtube video, and said, before starting, “the trickiest thing about playing videos in lectures is getting the sound to work usually.” So we can deduce that this is a problem she has usually.

She made sure the laptop’s volume was turned up – she was fine with that. Then it came to the volume on the Youtube video. When you hover over the volume button this is what you see:

The volume control rolls out (as it should, to hide unnecessary parts of the UI to make it less complex), and the tooltip you see says “Mute”. The lecturer made sure the volume slider was knocked all the way up to 100%.

And here’s where she got confused. She clicked on the volume button.

Everyone in the lecture theatre (largely just 20 year old students, all bought up with the Youtube interface) blinked at her, a little confused. Someone said “You need to click the volume button again, to unmute it.” And she said “but then the tooltip says that it’s muted…”

What had happened was that she saw the tooltip and read it as the current state: “Mute”. So clicking it again would change the state to unmuted, in her mind. It completely make sense, if you think about it. The tooltip here, being both a verb and an adjective, makes its action ambiguous.

All of the YouTube interface uses verbs as the tooltip, so you’d think that would have made it obvious that the ‘mute’ text was also a verb. But it looks like that isn’t enough to be completely obvious.

Maybe tooltips should be more descriptive.

 

This update has little point: A secret project I’m working on

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I was looking through a Mashable post on some start-up companies which always gets me motivated. I want to be motivated because I wanna start working on that web app I want to release by the time I get back to uni in October. Seven months should be more than enough to program almost anything, but typically my heart isn’t in it. Hopefully it will be this time though.

I was reading that post and suddenly realised what I could make. I’m not going to release it here (because that’s how cool it is), but I am going to say that it’s focused on business, rather than social which I just assumed it would. Might not even happen, I’m gonna do some research and some screen designs and stuff.

Does it being business orientated mean that it needs to be less sans-serif and more serif? Less curved edges? WordPress looks professional, but more matured because of that. I dunno, I’m not a designer. I suppose that I’ll just make it bland until it looks like a finished product and then get a designer to come fix it up. (I’m more likely to make money from a finished project than an unfinished one, so why started shelling out money when it’s unfinished?)

Kevin Rose apparently draws out screens or something? Hopefully they’ll follow up the video he and Tim did. They’re basically talking about how investing works these days. Hugely interesting and enlightening.