Tooltips for mobile

Ignition
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1

I am LOVING the new tooltips for 8.1.10, but I would love to have the option for these to be able to be displayed on mobile also. Is that an option? Is there a workaround to make that work?

2

How would you make them show up with no mouse to hover?

3

You would have to tap on them I think. Maybe long tap?

4

We thought about something like that, but we couldn’t decide on a universally accepted behavior to display a tooltip for mobile devices.

For example:
I’m using AppX and I long-press a category header. Should I expect a tooltip? There’s no visual indication that there should be a tooltip, so should users just expect that long-press anywhere will induce a tooltip?

We wound up deciding to let Designers determine when/where/how to display tooltips. You have the ability to specify onTouchStart events, so I recommend using those for mobile instances where you want tooltips to be displayed.

@pturmel : The new tooltips implementation allows for components to request their tooltip via scripting, so as long as you can configure an event which fires when you want, you can induce a tooltip at any time. Mobile devices do not need to “hover” per se, as long as something somewhere invokes .requestTooltip() for the component a tooltip is desired for.

It should also be noted that since you do NOT have the hover capabilities on mobile you need to be very cognizant about how you are REMOVING tooltips from the mobile device.

When using tooltips on mobile devices in general, I recommend a few patterns/settings:

  1. Don’t assume users will know to perform some action in order to get a tooltip. Provide some sort of UI that hints at the presence of a tooltip. Little i icons are great because it tells the user there is more info available to them. Desktop users will know to hover/click the icon, and mobile users will know they must tap the icon to see the info.
  2. Don’t make “permanent” tooltips. It can be really enticing to set the sustain property to 0 so that a tooltip remains in place until a user dismisses it, but dismissing tooltips can be very problematic for mobile users. I recommend tooltips not be sustained for more than 10 seconds; if a tooltip disappears before a user is done with it, the user can always bring it back.
  3. Tooltips should not repeat the information of the component they are attached to, nor should they display anything which is already displayed somewhere else.
5 Likes
5

Ah, missed that detail. :+1: