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Comment by blondin | Hacker News Reader

> "People need to feel that they can try things without damaging the system," recommended Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines.

well, for what it's worth, many modern apps aren't following that guideline. for a long time i have questioned the disappearance of tooltips in user interfaces. especially when everybody seems to come up with their own iconography nowadays.

the answer i got from UX people is that "you can't hover or have tooltips on mobile". they are trying to achieve uniformity between mobile and desktop.

they will probably confine that useful command palette to particular apps too. because you can't have a command palette on mobile either.

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> the answer i got from UX people is that "you can't hover or have tooltips on mobile". they are trying to achieve uniformity between mobile and desktop.

Achieving uniformity by reducing the user experience to the platforms' lowest common denominator. Not the best solution!

It actually doesn’t seem like that bad of an idea to me, at least under the assumption that you’re not going to maintain an entirely separate UI for the mobile and desktop apps (which would be ideal, but is incredibly expensive and tends to result in broken and missing features on one or both platforms even for companies with enormous budgets). I would argue that “reducing to the lowest common denominator” actually is one of the more reasonable solutions among the feasible options. It certainly isn’t a great solution to create a UI that is impossible to understand without tooltips and ship that UI to mobile devices without the tooltips!

Best option is to provide choice. Icons with Labels by default, show keyboard shortcut on hover. Want just icons? There’s a config option for that. Want just labels? Also an option. Want no toolbar at all, and only use shortcuts? Also an option.

It ebbs and flows but I feel like we're coming to the end of a long period of "convention over configuration" that prioritized consistent, predictable behaviour across systems at the cost of powerful options & custom configurations. I understand what you're saying but there's also cost to implement and maintain all those options you want, plus a huge set of testing combinations for QA

I clicked your profile to see exactly who would come up with such an odd take, and then it made sense.

I actually agree with you that this type of deep customisation is great for a "productivity tool" like VS Code. For something that people don't spend hours of every day in, though (say, a weather app), you don't need or want this level of customisation.

Hah, such a sleuth :)

Though I was actually thinking of SketchUp when writing that. VS Code does not provide always-visible labels for icons (tooltip only), though it’s something we’ve discussed and I’m in favor of. I believe Teams recently adopted them.

abundance of choice is inversely correlated with satisfaction

https://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/bschwar1/Sci.Amer.pdf

When the extra choices are useless, and the few choices are genuinely the best ones, sure. That's not what we're seeing.

That applies to when a choice must be made before the user can proceed, or when making once choice has an associated opportunity cost that prevents/discourages the user from making other choices. If the user is presented with sane defaults from the start and can also try toggling a checkbox in a settings UI to instantly test alternatives, the study does not apply.

As the siblings mention it doesn't really apply here because the choices aren't one-shot, you aren't stuck with one, you have time to consider, choices can differ a lot, etc.

But really any supposed psychological phenomenon should be looked at skeptically absent overwhelming evidence like IQ or the Big 5 personality traits. Here are three links on "choice overload":

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/48210291_Can_There_... 2010 meta-analysis, "we found a mean effect size of virtually zero but considerable variance between studies"

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8426193 2018, "...where they could compare them one another anytime with relatively low cognitive load, the choice overload did not occur (Experiment 1). ... where participants had to compare them based on memory representations with relatively high cognitive load, the choice overload did occur (Experiment 2). These results suggest that the choice overload is actually replicable when cognitive load is sufficiently boosted."

http://psychbrief.com/choice-paradox/ Nice overview of some actual studies and the underlying experiments, as well as common flaws in the mathematical methods used for analysis that apply to many psychology studies.

It's a terrible idea to me! Like sure, I know the devs want to do the minimum of work, but that doesn't make it a good idea to take the easy way out.

> It certainly isn’t a great solution to create a UI that is impossible to understand without tooltips and ship that UI to mobile devices without the tooltips!

Right, so don't do that. But, desktop and mobile are different platforms with different input devices, and designers should make use of both to create the best experience for users. There are certainly tradeoffs in terms of cost to implement versus value for users, and if the argument is "it will simply cost us too much money to implement tooltips" then I suppose that's up to the product manager or equivalent. But, "we can't have tooltips on desktop because the mobile version doesn't support them" is a non sequitor. If a UX person gave that as a reason, I'd have some questions for them.

Rule of the lowest common denominator, whether it be by way of trying to accommodate multiple form factors or multiple operating systems is certainly one of the biggest drivers of the decline of truly excellent software. One size fits all is never going to fit anybody even half as well as something more tailored to a specific subset.

I would like to see someone try the opposite, where when possible gaps in functionality on one platform or form factor are filled in, so all users’ experiences are elevated by the most capable target rather than dragged down by the least capable. That will probably never happen though.

> the answer i got from UX people is that "you can't hover or have tooltips on mobile". they are trying to achieve uniformity between mobile and desktop.

Yes you can. The generally agreed upon way to do this is by long pressing whatever you want to see a tooltip over.

I’m not aware of anyone agreeing to that. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a mobile UI that shows tooltips when you long press on a button.

That's the standard on Android, especially for the built-in apps.

https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/tooltips

I think it's kind of funny how Google is using this as an example when their own Gmail app in iOS has the "Write a new email" action as a floating action button with a pencil and the word "Compose".

I wish they labeled all the major FABs. It took me ages to figure out how to make a new spreadsheet in Google Sheets on the desktop after they switched to a mobile-first UI. That Google-logo-colored "+" button in the lower right is not easy to see. If it had text next to it I'm sure it would have been harder to overlook.

The problem with this is how you indicate to users that tooltips exist via the long press action. I personally never knew that long press to show a tooltip was the "generally agreed upon way" to show tooltips, and it would be a lot simpler to just have a button label.

How do you indicate to users that they can right-click on a computer mouse? You don't; they just know it. If they don't, their friends and family will teach them.

It's pretty undesirable to hide functionality behind invisible gestures or menus specifically because users do not "just know it".

Better than just deleting the functionality.

You put a line of text in the mobile UI that says "To see tooltips, press and hold on a button."

You can stop showing that line of text once they've shown a tooltip (or two, if you're worried about them triggering it accidentally and not knowing how they did it).

A gui combined with tooltips is one the easiest to learn interfaces. I have a very bad memory and GUIs show me what my options are. It's like typing a command with --help except it's always there

I'm always glad when an app with confusing buttons has 'tooltips' implemented that pop up when you long-press a button.

I think long-pressing for more info on touch screens feels quite intuitive, similar to how hovering feels intuitive when you have a mouse pointer.

I don't understand the relationship you are suggesting between tooltips and feeling that you can try things without damaging the system.

It's harder to damage things if tooltips give you some idea of what's going to happen when you push a button.

Either you have a tooltip explaining the function or you have to test it to understand what it does. But to test something you want to know it doesn't cause problems.

I feel like this is some fundamental UX dimension here. Cost and risk of learning. How much time do I have to use to learn all the commands or find the right command and if I have to try it what is the risk of breaking something?

Just as relevant in cli applications.

Another thing that helps is a predictable, reliable undo function. If the user believes that any action is easy to undo, unknown actions won't be so scary. Of course, this is sort of a chicken-and-egg problem, because other than ctrl-z in certain desktop environments (in which environments undo is not always either predictable or reliable), there is no well-known idiom for undo.

see: the blackberry storm, which had hovering with a touch screen. I loved that phone.

How? Did you long press on it?

Judging from old reviews of the phone, it looks like a positional proximity sensor. The screen had a blue hover glow where your finger approached the screen.

It was literally a screen mounted on a button, actually.

The whole screen was mounted on a big button, so touching it was hovering and you'd press the screen with a satisfying click to execute something. It wasn't the most reliable if you weren't careful, but why not do that with a pressure sensor nowdays?

Also known as force touch on an iPhone.

I've not used an iPhone for a while, but according to Google search:

> The iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro will ditch 3D Touch in favor of "Haptic Touch," according to Apple's website. ... The new iPhones' Haptic Touch will be responsive to how long users hold down, but not the force of the tap.

I would love that feature, but I think it has to be very integrated into the software and the APIs of the phone OS or no one will actually use it.

I loved force touch but it's gone now. On MacOS the touchpad still has force touch, and hard pressing on a word anywhere in the OS brings up dictionary definitions. It's amazing for language learners.

So many icons are not obvious. Why not some text under it if you can have tool tips.

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