Tooltips need a delay, and then they need to skip it (blog.master.dev)
133 points by ibobev 12 hours ago
ProxCoques 7 hours ago
It 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.
pastel8739 an hour ago
Because every single application rebuilds their own operating system
hinkley 5 hours ago
Chesterton's Fence.
Why on earth do we need this thing here?
Oh, that's why.
projektfu 3 hours ago
Raskin left Apple in 1982.
brixie 8 hours ago
This looks it's describing the same technique as the last example in 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.
hurrell 10 hours ago
I think I would describe this as an example of hysteresis. Neat! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteresis
xg15 10 hours ago
Interestingly, 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
I think there was also an article about it on The Old New Thing, but I can't seem to find it anymore.
lelandfe 2 hours ago
Like 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/
> I asked the Framer Agent to fix it, and within minutes it had built and applied what I now call trajectory-based menu aim
thaumasiotes 2 hours 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?
compiler-guy 11 hours ago
I 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.
nlawalker an hour ago
My 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.
gblargg 11 hours ago
Opus Magnum suffers from this. It feels like punishment for taking the most direct route to get the cursor where I want it.
wang_li 10 hours ago
If 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.
phyzome 11 hours ago
I 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 10 hours ago
what did the JS provide that the CSS solve wasn't the only solve?
jcranmer 9 hours ago
Not 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.
kazinator 2 hours ago
Basically, 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.
nayroclade 11 hours ago
Chris Coyier also posted a version using only HTML/CSS, no JS: https://blog.master.dev/delayed-then-instant-tooltips-with-h...
goda90 9 hours ago
What about using mouse velocity? If the mouse is changing position at a certain rate, don't show the tooltips.
jareklupinski 9 hours ago
i only show tooltips if you wiggle the mouse cursor over an element
thoughtbefore 6 hours ago
On 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
kwarcode 3 hours ago
Prydown 2 hours ago
Windows taskbar has done this forever and I never once noticed it consciously. Good catch.
cush 33 minutes ago
I was disappointed to see the new web popover api doesn't have this basic usability feature built in
jameshart 6 hours ago
Feels like the delay also gets implemented into displaying the tooltip on tap on a touch interface which is probably an error.
zx8080 3 hours ago
Is this post text claude-generated? Very creepy to read around the solution section. It reads like the agent report.
self_awareness 8 hours ago
Hilarious. Web devs discovering UX from Win95. What's next, 3d buttons?
ProxCoques 7 hours ago
I 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 5 hours ago
I 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 5 hours ago
halostatue 11 hours ago
The pure CSS version seems more interesting to me: https://blog.master.dev/delayed-then-instant-tooltips-with-h...
jay_kyburz 8 hours ago
Perhaps I'm just an old grump, but I prefer the No Delay version in the example.
I like predictable, consistent, and fast.
broken-kebab 4 hours ago
Same. To me exactly delayed version is annoying. Non-obvious rules which guide behavior make it feel like there's a bug.