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Super Tooltips

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On Tuesday,
I mentioned some of the barriers I see to people using help regularly in Office. 
Based on the comments, I can tell that many of you have strong feelings about
the Office help system.  The team that owns the help system has read your
comments and Mike Kelly, one of the leaders of that team,
has a blog in which he discusses
improvements being made to user assistance in Office 12.  Just an FYI,
in case you want to check out their direction.

Today, I want to introduce the way we've integrated help content into the
Office 12 user interface: a feature we call "Super Tooltips."

The idea is simple: tooltips are successfully and frequently used by people
at all skill and experience levels.  We wanted to take the design of
tooltips in Office to the next level.  "Super Tooltips" (just a code name)
were born.

First, every tooltip contains the feature name and keyboard shortcut (if it
has one.)  This is the bare minimum you'd expect from a tooltips in Office,
and we haven't changed that.  No surprises yet.

Next, we add to every feature's tooltip a short text description letting you
know what that feature is for.  We've written these in the form of: "This is the right feature
to use if you want to [tooltip text here] ."  The concept is
to give you the idea of what a feature is for without needing to look it
up in help or in a manual.

Super Tooltips: Answering "when should you use this feature"

They say "a picture is worth a thousand words" and often times that's true
when trying to explain what a feature is for.  The next enhancement we made
is the ability to include an explanatory image in the tooltip itself.  A
good example of why this is useful is "Insert Caption" in Word.  Someone might not
know what a "caption" is, but when they see the little picture with a
line of text saying "Figure 7: blah blah blah" under it, they suddenly understand what it
is.  That's the value of a picture.

A picture in hand is worth two in the bush

I mentioned in
my
article on help that one of the problems I perceive today is that there is no
formal link between the user interface and the help system.  If I don't know what
a feature does, the best I can hope for is to remember the name of the feature,
open the help window, type in the name of the feature, and select from a list of
articles that come back.  In many cases, believe it or not, the "official"
article for a feature shows up at the bottom of the list of results or not at
all.

Super Tooltips bridge the gap between the user interface and the help system.  By
the time we ship Office 12, every feature with a help article will be linked
directly from the tooltip.  Super Tooltips advertise this with "Press F1 for
more help" at the bottom; pressing F1 takes you directly to more information
about the selected feature.  Direct access--no more fumbling around or
searching aimlessly.

Press F1 for direct help: tooltips bridge the UI and help system

Have you ever tried to use a command that was disabled and couldn't figure
out why it was grayed out?  Another feature we've added to tooltips is the
ability to communicate to you why it's disabled and what steps you might need to
take to enable it.  We plan to have support for many common scenarios when
we ship Office 12, including read-only documents, documents saved in an older
file format, documents you don't have permission to edit, etc.  Now that
the architecture is in place, we'll continue to extend this in the future to
even more scenarios.  The long-term is goal is for you never to be stuck
and confused, wondering what magic trick is necessary to enable a command.

The layout is ugly in current builds, but the feature is cool nonetheless...

One last touch: you may remember many moons ago I
wrote
about Dialog Launchers.  Yes, we're changing the widget, no need to
flame me again... :)   Early in our research for Office 12, we
discovered that a lot of people identified dialog boxes by their look alone. 
They didn't read the text in the dialog box, but scanned the layout
and design and made a decision about whether it was the "right one" solely based
on that.  So, to try to make that experience a little more efficient with
the Ribbon, the tooltips for Dialog Launchers show a preview of what the dialog
box looks like.

Am I the dialog box you're looking for?

You might be concerned about bigger tooltips covering up the Ribbon while
you're searching for commands.  Not to worry--Super Tooltips always appear
directly below the Ribbon, so they never cover up the command space.  And,
if you decide they're not your thing, you can always revert back to old "command
name only" tooltips.

We've tried to extend tooltips in the Office 12 user interface to make them a
lot more useful and to save people time and clicks.  We want tooltips not
just to help answer the question "what is this feature called?" but also "why
would I use it?", "how do I find out more about it?", and "why is it disabled
and how can I enable it?"  Super Tooltips bridge the gap between the user
interface and help system, providing an efficient mechanism to get directly from
the product to the documentation.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    December 02, 2005
    Based on the pictures this looks like a great evolution of the good, old tooltips.

  • Anonymous
    December 02, 2005
    Awsome stuff. I can't believe how good Office 12 is looking...

  • Anonymous
    December 02, 2005
    I don't know whether to celebrate, or rant that this wasn't done years ago!

    Great new feature, and I would think that even expert users should benefit from this functionality.

    I'm increasingly impressed how the Office 12 team really seems to understand some of the difficulties of working with earlier versions. Its about time that someone did a radical re-thinking of how the fundamental interface works, instead of just falling back on "time-tested" techniques. (Which apparently weren't all that great anyway!!)

  • Anonymous
    December 02, 2005
    Am I the only one bothered by "shows arrows to indicate what cells affect the value of the currently selected cell" when it should clearly be which cells? ;-)

  • Anonymous
    December 02, 2005
    Absolutely awesome. This feature in itself should reduce the number of helpdesk calls users place.

    Keep up the good work :)

  • Anonymous
    December 02, 2005
    Lovely.

    As with all great ideas, it seems so obvious once you've thought of it. Of course tooltips should have pictures! Why hasn't this been done before?! ;-)

  • Anonymous
    December 02, 2005
    Two things for the super tool tips:
    1. Make sure the "Press F1 for more help" is a click-able hyperlink that opens the help file. When people are moving the mouse over the buttons, they are focused on using the mouse. Having to press F1 switches them over to the keyboard.
    2. You said about people not liking the big tooltips and it covering up the ribbon. It may also cover up the document that I'm working on, which I may need to see while searching for the right command to use on it. Maybe but a little X in the upper right corner that closes super tooltips for that trip to the ribbon.

    Otherwise, very nice!

  • Anonymous
    December 02, 2005
    I've been entirely reworking the UI for the product I work on. I can't believe how many of "my innovations" are now in Office 12. It's good to know that I'm on the right track, just a pity my boss will think I've been copying! :)

    Keep up the good work!

  • Anonymous
    December 02, 2005
    It's a good idea (6) (if that is your real name!), but you can't click a tooltip... they disappear when you try to move your mouse over them! (By design of course.)

    Still, he has a point about moving focus from the mouse to the keyboard. I wonder if there's another way.

  • Anonymous
    December 02, 2005
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 02, 2005
    On disabled tooltips, why not include a button or a link to do what you are saying. For example instead of just saying "To enable this feature, upgrade the document by selecting "Upgrade". Why not just include a simple way to do what you are explaining.

    If this is a problem because of tooltips disappearing when you mouse over them, you might at least offer the keyboard command to do whatever it is that needs to be done.

  • Anonymous
    December 02, 2005
    Very very nice, but why tooltip with "upgrade the document by selecting Upgrade in File menu" when this could be a hyper-link right here doing this for user, instead of giving directions what to do?

    This is what was done with Windows help files, and works very nice usually.

  • Anonymous
    December 02, 2005
    Dominic: Nope, I'm with you!

    James: Some tooltips are already clickable. For example, type =(Sum(... in an Excel cell; you can drag around and click in the formula tooltip. That's been around a while. So it shouldn't be hard to make the help links clickable, and I second you that it's a good idea.

  • Anonymous
    December 02, 2005
    These tooltips are one of my favorite features in the O12 beta. It really makes all the features more discoverable.

  • Anonymous
    December 02, 2005
    I think these are great - I just hope they're not a substitute for good design...

  • Anonymous
    December 02, 2005
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 02, 2005
    Wow! I asked you to take credit for what I thought was the best help-related improvement in Office 12 (which I'd seen only in some of your previous screenshots) and you blew me away. I'm dying to do the "mom" test with these. ;-)

  • Anonymous
    December 02, 2005
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 02, 2005
    I think the answer to making clickable links in the tooltips so as not to make people reach for the keyboard or go to other menus is simple: the right mouse button. Just have a context menu where the first option is "hide tooltip", the second "help on this feature", the third any links from the feature such as "upgrade the document", and then "customise" or whatever else you were designing under that.

    And how about an option where you can set the delay before tooltips appear? It would be useful to make it so that people unfamiliar with the interface can find this info quicker, or keep it out of the way for people who don't like it.

  • Anonymous
    December 04, 2005
    The tooltips look great.

    Something I've been wondering about these and the other new controls in Office - will Microsoft be making these publically available so other software can use the controls? I know some previous versions of Office haven't made their new UI controls available, so people write controls that emulate the behaviour etc... it just seems a bit messy. It would be really great if the UI libraries were separately installable as an OS patch or something, and any app could use them.

  • Anonymous
    December 04, 2005
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 05, 2005
    A couple of things:

    1) Please use the same delay mechanism that's in place today for these shortcuts. Please don't use a two-stage mechanism.

    2) Please don't include an option for turning these off. Options should be used for real needs, not just placating people who don't like change. Though this requires you be very careful. I was glad Clippy could be turned off because he was just annoying. Besides your options dialog is just getting silly in size.

    3) As for mechanisms for activiting content within the tooltip, you did a good job. Unfortunately since the only action for creating these tooltips is onmouseover you're pretty much out of luck. While you could go with right click, that would require you to change the default behavior or expand upon it. I'm not sure that's it's intuitive either since you won't be right-clicking on the tooltip, but rather on the button that shows the tooltip.

    4) Great job.

  • Anonymous
    December 05, 2005
    "Have you ever tried to use a command that was disabled and couldn't figure out why it was grayed out?"

    We put just this feature in Cardbox 3.0 about eighteen months ago. I'm glad you're doing it too and I hope that it'll become standard in the software industry. That way people will expect it and we won't keep having to tell them "why is the command disabled? Move your mouse onto it and Cardbox will tell you".

  • Anonymous
    December 05, 2005
    I hope you´ll include the keyboard shortcuts inside the super tooltips too. Maybe the hint can be next to the "press f1 for more help".

  • Anonymous
    December 05, 2005
    I love these Super Tooltips! What an enhancement. I have many people who just refuse to look in Help but with these tips so convenient, they are bound to use them.

    What would even be better is to have a "Show Me" or "watch a video" to show people a short multimedia clip of exactly how to use it. What a training tool that would be!

  • Anonymous
    December 05, 2005
    The feature is very good but I bet there is a way to further improve:
    what if users can had a short note at the end of the Super Tooltip?

    The first part of it contains the description Microsoft decided to put on, the second (just below) can contain a custom description from the user.

    So if I frequently use an Office command for some particular tasks which require a precise order of accomplishment (or a particular attention to some details) I could write it on the Super Tooltip and be always aware of it.

    Another example: a foreign language user (let's say Italian like me) forced to use an english Office version, can add a small italian description for the most used features.

    This is also a convenient way to train new users while doing training on the job: the skilled user add some useful comments to certain features so the newbie user is aware of some things when using it.

  • Anonymous
    December 07, 2005
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 07, 2005
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    February 03, 2006
    One of the key design tenets of the Office 12 user interface is making sure
    that the set of features...

  • Anonymous
    February 06, 2006
    You may remember that
    last week
    I described the textual separators that we use in Office 12 menus to...

  • Anonymous
    February 13, 2006
    PingBack from http://blog.jensthebrain.de/archives/2006/02/13/office-12-word/

  • Anonymous
    February 14, 2006
    PingBack from http://techwritetips.wordpress.com/2006/02/14/the-great-divide/

  • Anonymous
    March 17, 2006
    Many moons ago, I mentioned that one of the impetuses behind the new Office 2007 user interface was the...

  • Anonymous
    April 04, 2006
    PingBack from http://www.mydeathmatch.de/?p=14

  • Anonymous
    April 28, 2006
    One of the special pieces of the Office 2007 user interface is the entry point to the help system.
    Unlike...

  • Anonymous
    May 19, 2006
    One of the most challenging aspects of developing the new UI has been making sure that everything ends...

  • Anonymous
    July 03, 2006
    PingBack from http://techwritetips.wordpress.com/2006/07/03/screen-portrait-minis/

  • Anonymous
    July 23, 2006
    PingBack from http://techwritetips.wordpress.com/2006/05/03/what-is-vista-office-help/

  • Anonymous
    August 28, 2006
    It was with a bit of surprise that I read a flurry of stories on Friday with breathless headlines like...

  • Anonymous
    December 25, 2006
    .. you can do it, we can do it too !! Did it annoy you, ever, that the ToolTip class was so darned limited

  • Anonymous
    February 04, 2007
    PingBack from http://fly.ingsparks.de/2005-12-01/hilfe-funktionen-helfen-nur-experten/

  • Anonymous
    June 04, 2008
    PingBack from http://www.pushing-pixels.org/?p=333

  • Anonymous
    October 27, 2008
    PingBack from http://mstechnews.info/2008/10/the-office-2007-ui-bible/

  • Anonymous
    June 16, 2009
    PingBack from http://fixmycrediteasily.info/story.php?id=5472