Short Description
Examples:
-
Windows tooltips
-
Mac bubble-help
-
Status bar help
Context: The artifact contains a visual pointer, or
"virtual fingertip" (mouse or pen point, for instance) that is the focal
point for the user's interaction with the artifact. Nearly all the
primary patterns with a visual component can use this to good effect, particularly
Navigable Spaces for link descriptions,
High-density Information
Display, Status Display, Control
Panel, and WYSIWYG Editor.
Problem: How should the artifact present additional
content, in the form of clarifying data or explanations of possible actions,
to the users that need it?
Forces:
-
A short explanation may be all the user needs or wants; something long
will be overkill.
-
Users generally don't want to leave the artifact and go somewhere else
for help, such as a manual; this usually breaks one's concentration and
costs too much time.
-
There isn't room to put static descriptive text into the artifact, or visual
elegance precludes doing so.
-
The descriptive text might be useless most of the time, and may become
irritating if it is static or hard to turn off.
Solution: Show a short (one sentence or shorter)
description of a thing, in close spatial and/or temporal proximity to the
thing itself. Allow the user to turn it on and off, especially
if the description obscures other things or is otherwise irritating; alternatively,
don't show it without some deliberate user action on an item-by-item basis,
such as pressing a key or hovering over the item for a certain length of
time.
Resulting Context: You get to decide what text to
put into the Short Description. There's no point in being redundant
with whatever's statically shown in the artifact; if you're going to impinge
upon the user's attention with a popup or something, at least add some
value with it. You could use it to describe a possible action (as
with Pointer Shows Affordance),
or describe the results of the action, or reveal more data (thus implementing
Optional Detail On Demand).
Notes: In his January
11, 1998 Alertbox column, Jakob Nielsen strongly recommends using link
titles to help give the user a preview of where a Web link goes; they add
important contextual information to the sometimes-mysterious HTML links.
These are effectively Short Descriptions.
I've never seen it done, but this pattern could theoretically be used
with speech in a multimodal interface. As you focus your visual attention
on some feature, the Short Description for that feature could be spoken
aloud to you.
Comments to: jtidwell@alum.mit.edu
Last modified May 17, 1999
Copyright (c) 1999 by Jenifer Tidwell. All rights reserved.