About Face 2.0(c) The Essentials of Interaction Design

The biggest problem with toolbars is that although their controls are fast and quickly memorable, they are not initially decipherable. How is the new user supposed to learn what butcons and other toolbar controls do?

Balloon help: A first attempt

Apple was the first to attempt a solution by inventing a facility for the Macintosh called balloon help. Balloon help is one of those frustrating ideas that everyone can clearly see is good, yet nobody actually wants to use. Balloon help is a flyover facility (sometimes called rollover or mouseover). This means that it appears as the mouse cursor passes over something without the user pressing a mouse button, similar to active visual hinting.

When balloon help is active, little speech bubbles like those in comic strips appear next to the object that the mouse points to. Inside the speech bubble is a brief sentence or two explaining that object's function.

Balloon help doesn't work for a good reason. It is founded on the misconception that it is acceptable to discomfit daily users for the benefit of first-timers. The balloons were too big, too obtrusive, and too condescending. They were very much in the way. Most users find them so annoyingly in-your-face that they keep them turned off. Then, when they have forgotten what some object is, they have to go up to the menu, pull it down, turn balloon help on, point to the unknown object, read the balloon, go back to the menu, and turn balloon help off. Whew, what a pain!

ToolTips

Microsoft is never one to make things easy for the beginner at the expense of the more frequent user. It has invented a true variant of balloon help called ToolTips that is one of the cleverest and most-effective user interface idioms we've ever seen.

At first, ToolTips seem the same as balloon help, but on closer inspection you can see the minor physical and behavioral differences that have a huge effect from the user's point-of-view. Unlike balloon help, ToolTips only explain the purpose of controls on the toolbar (and identify items in the Taskbar and application status bars). They don't try to explain other stuff on the screen like scroll bars, menus, and desktop icons. Microsoft obviously understands that the user doesn't need to have the very basics explained. It also shows an understanding that, although we are all beginners once, we all evolve into more-experienced daily users.

ToolTips contain a single word or a very short phrase. They don't attempt to explain in prose how the object is used; they assume that you will get the rest from context. This is probably the single most-important advance that ToolTips have over balloon help, illustrating the difference in design intent of Microsoft versus Apple. Apple wanted its bubbles to teach things to first-time users. Microsoft figured that first-timers would just have to learn how things work the hard way, and ToolTips would merely act as a memory jogger for frequent users.

By making the controls on the toolbar so much more accessible for normal users, Microsoft has allowed the toolbar to evolve beyond simply supporting menus. ToolTips have freed the toolbar to take the lead as the main idiom for issuing commands to sovereign applications. This also allows the menu to quietly recede into the background as a command vector for beginners and for invoking occasionally used functions. The natural order of butcons as the primary idiom, with menus as a backup, makes sovereign applications much easier to use. For transient programs, though, most users qualify as first-time or infrequent users, so the need for butcons—short cuts—is much reduced.

ToolTip windows are very small, and they have the presence of mind to not obscure important parts of the screen. As you can see in Figure 29-1, they appear underneath the butcons they are explaining and labeling them without consuming the space needed for dedicated labels. There is a critical time delay, about a half a second, between placing the cursor on a butcon and having the ToolTip appear. This is just enough time to point to and select the function without getting the ToolTip. This design decision ensures that you aren't barraged by little pop-ups as you move the mouse across the toolbar trying to do actual work—a problem that early versions of balloon help suffered from. It also means that if you forget what a rarely used butcon is for, you only need to invest a half-second to find out.

Figure 29-1: Microsoft's ToolTips were the solution to the toolbar problem. Although toolbars are for experienced users, sometimes these users forget the purpose of a less-frequently used command. The little text box that pops up as the cursor rests for a second is all that is needed to remind the user of the butcon's function. The ToolTip succeeds because it respects the user by not being pedantic and by having a very strongly developed respect for the value of pixels. ToolTips were the gate that allowed the toolbar to develop as the primary control mechanism in sovereign applications, while letting the menu fall quietly into the background as a purely pedagogic and occasional-use command vector.

A little picture of a printer may be ambiguous until you see the word Print next to it. There is now no confusion in your mind. If the butcon were used to configure the printer it would say Configure Printer or even just Printer, referring to the peripheral rather than to its function. The context tells you the rest. The economy of pixels is superb.

The authors are both experienced users and leave ToolTips on all the time. Balloon help on our Macs is never on. Microsoft's solution is a quantum leap beyond balloon help, and yet it is almost exactly the same. It just goes to prove that the devil is in the details.

Toolbars without ToolTips force users to sift though menus, learn their function by experimentation, or worst of all, read the documentation. Because toolbars contain immediate versions of commands that should be used by moderately experienced users, they inevitably contain some that are dislocating or dangerous. Explaining the purpose of butcons with a line of text on the status line at the bottom of the screen just isn't as good as ToolTips that appear right there where you're looking.

Do not create toolbars without ToolTips. In fact, ToolTips should be used on all iconic butcons, even those on dialog boxes.

Disabling toolbar controls

Toolbar controls should become disabled if they are not applicable to the current selection. They must not offer a pliant response: The butcon must not depress, for example, and controls should also gray themselves out to make matters absolutely clear.

Some programs make disabled toolbar controls disappear altogether, and the effect of this is ghastly. Users remember toolbar layouts by position, and with this behavior, the trusted toolbar becomes a skittish, tentative idiom that scares the daylights out of new users and disorients even those more experienced (such as the authors!). The path to modeless operation does not lie in becoming more ephemeral but rather in becoming more solid, permanent, and dependable.