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Don't swipe-animate tooltips


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The UI is full of tooltips like this one:

kIIx5n8.png

 

When displaying tooltips, there are basically three options I can think of for displaying.  KSP2 is currently using the third.

  1. Instant.  When the mouse goes over the control, the tooltip instantly pops up, with full text
    • Advantage:  Instantly informative.
    • Disadvantage:  Distracting (too easy to trigger accidentally or unnecessarily).
  2. Delayed.  When the mouse goes over the control, nothing happens at once.  But if the mouse hovers there for some timer period, then the tooltip pops up, with full text.
    • Advantage:  Unintrusive (doesn't show up unless you hover, which is typically an intentional act).
    • Disadvantage:  Slow (if the user wants the info, forces them to wait for it)
  3. Swipe-animated.  When the mouse goes over the control, instantly pop up a blank tooltip with no text.  Then the text gradually animates into place, "swiping" from left, like low-baud-rate text coming over a modem or something.  (This is what KSP2 is doing now.)
    • Advantage:  None
    • Disadvantage:  Manages to be both  distracting and slow.  Triggers instantly and distractingly every time, even if you didn't need the tip... but once it does trigger, forces you to wait for the content while it swipes.  Also, maybe this is just me, but the motion and animation is absolutely maddening and jarring-- it's injecting flashy motion into a scene that's otherwise fairly static, and it drags my eye away from the important stuff on the screen.

It's a really cute idea, and I'm sure it sounded great on paper, and it certainly is "stylish".  However, in practical terms, these animated tooltips are driving me absolutely batty.  The animation serves no useful purpose, and gives them the  worst of both worlds.

My suggestion is, pick either the "instant" or the "delayed" model, and go with that.  My personal preference is for the "delayed" model, since that's how tooltips work for virtually every UI I've ever used, and for good reason.  However, even though I would like "instant" a lot less than "delayed", it would still be infinitely better than the current animated behavior, which I find a distracting nuisance.

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