[kde-guidelines] Styleguide: Tool-tips

[Aurélien Gâteau]

On Thursday 04 July 2013 13:43:19 Heiko Tietze wrote:
> User Assistance > User-driven information
> * Provide Tool-tips for user driven information
> 
> http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Usability/HIG/Tooltip
> 
> Purpose
> A ''tool-tip'' is a small pop-up window that labels the unlabeled control
> being pointed to, such as toolbar controls without caption or command
> buttons. When providing more descriptive text the control is called
> ''info-tip''. Tips are a form of progressive disclosure, eliminating the
> need always to have descriptive text on the screen. This time-delay
> mechanism makes tips very convenient, but it also reduces their
> discoverability. When tips are used consistently they support user’s
> expectation and foster predictability.
> 
> Guidelines
> * Use tips to label unlabeled controls and to provide additional
> information.
> * Don’t use tips for warnings.
> * Use user defined default timeouts for initialization, reshow, and removal.
> Don't disable auto hide feature.

Developers cannot alter any of those so it may not be worth keeping it. 

> * Keep tips brief, typically five words or less for tool-tips; whenever
> appropriate, provide keyboard shortcuts and default values.
> * Format info-tips to make their content easier to read and scan by grouping
> and aligning the content. The information should be:
> ** concise: large, unformatted blocks of text are difficult to read and
> overwhelming
> ** helpful: it shouldn't be obvious or just repeat what is already on the
> screen)
> ** supplemental: important information should be communicated using self-
> explanatory control labels or in-place supplemental text)
> ** static: tips should not change from one instance to the next)
> * Consider to add small info buttons for use tips with a touch screen.
> 
> Question: Can we made the distinction between tool- and info-tip?

>From an implementation point of view, Qt has two classes, QToolTip and 
QWhatsThis. Both classes support rich text.

QToolTip is used for short texts appearing automatically on mouse over.
What you call tool-tip is QToolTip.

QWhatsThis is used for longer text. The historic use case for this was a 
"what's this?" mode introduced in Windows 95 and which could be entered by 
clicking on a "?" button in the title bar of some windows. We still have a few 
applications doing this in KDE, for example System Settings.

Nowadays, some applications use QWhatsThis differently: they provide help 
buttons or link-like labels which show a QWhatsThis when clicked. Attached is 
an example from KMail: I clicked on "How does this work?" (yes, it looks ugly)

QWhatsThis is not really info-tip though, because its primary use case is to 
support the "what's this?" mode. The ability to show a QWhatsThis window 
independently from this mode is a by-product. I think we should not promote 
info-tips and we should not mention QWhatsThis as implementing them info-tip 
for now, instead we should get a proper widget to show them, this widget would 
look either like a '?' button or a link-like label and would show the tip when 
triggered.

Aurélien
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