

End hover abuse now - joshuacc
http://www.cennydd.co.uk/2010/end-hover-abuse-now/

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rarestblog
The worst (for me) current example of hover abuse comes from Google Images.

Try searching for something on Google Images, then click the search field and
try to refine your query. Didn't work? Well, that's because you moved the
mouse away from search field (so that it doesn't cover what you type), but
Google then accepts hovering over an image as a sign that now you want to use
your keyboard(?) to move through images.

The problem is that (probably) about 95% of screen are images that activate
this (keyboard) mode on hover. So, to do a second search on Google Images you
have to be extremely careful about where you park your mouse before searching.

~~~
mthoms
See also: Techcrunch.

Their combination of "Snapshots" hover boxes, and autoscrolling widgets is so
dreadful that I recently disabled Javascript entirely for the TC domain.

That was the first time in nearly 15 years of using the internet that I felt
compelled to do so.

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kls
I have to agree with this one. I went round and round, with a (top of the
industry) UX designer on a project we where working on. All of the profiles
where called out to pop up a user summary when the user hovered over the
profile thumb. While it was still usable it is annoying, especially for
persons with disability (one of my UX specializations) screen readers like
JAWS. I had to develop an entire library to trick JAWS into reading the site
correctly because of these things. To me, if a user wants to see a summary of
the profile, they can click, then provide an extender to show the full
profile. They wanted to reserve the click for taking them to the profile. To
me it is silly to kill usability because you think that a click is reserved
for displaying the full information. When a link could be provided in the
summary to accomplish the same task.

~~~
ultrasaurus
"if a user wants to see a summary of the profile, they can click"

Or much of the benefit can be had through the title attribute, with the bonus
benefit of working with screen readers (
<http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html#h-12.1.4> )

Do any of the Accessibility laws require designers to spend a day using a
screen reader? I'd love to see that.

~~~
kls
I always use JAWS on any project that I work on, if it does not work correctly
it gets scrapped and reworked. Many times the UX designers I work with do not,
are ignorant of the fact and combative about it. So in the end the onus falls
on me to make the damn thing work which can require some pretty involved
JavaScript tricks and browser hacks. I have thought about releasing a library
of all of these accessibility helpers. As I have never really found one that
focuses on accessibility.

~~~
wahnfrieden
Take a look a lt Dojo Toolkit's UI widgets (Dijit) - they at least advertise
full accessibility compliance, and the set of widgets is rather comprehensive.
Might save you some time in the future even if you just use them as a starting
point for your own UI.

~~~
kls
Yes I use Dojo extensively, It is my toolkit of choice for a plethora of
reasons, but accessibility is one of them.

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hkuo
Thankfully, as touch screen devices such as the iPhone, iPad, and upcoming
palm or windows touch devices come out, hover states will be forced to fade
away as it becomes cumbersome to design interfaces for both touch and non-
touch computers.

~~~
jessriedel
I still worry that one day apple devices will start tracking where your eyes
are looking...

~~~
alttab
There are companies already doing this. With the front facing camera on the
iPhone4, you could track eye movements and even have a cost-per-glance model.

~~~
ben1040
If anyone from GazeHawk is reading this, they totally should be using iPhone 4
owners to generate heatmaps of mobile sites like they do already with desktop
users.

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qntm
This, incidentally, is the major problem I have with Google's latest Image
Search interface. Most of the screen is tiled with hover-sensitive areas, and
it's not safe to leave the mouse pointer where it is while you browse the
images because something will expand into the foreground, blocking out other
stuff nearby.

I think it's called Midas Touch Syndrome.

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noblethrasher
I follow this maxim: Small actions should have small consequences. The best UI
should allow for _arbitrarily_ small actions that result in arbitrarily small
consequences (e.g. the scroll bar, multitouch, drag/drop). We live in a
continuous universe† and this makes for the most natural and easily
discoverable interface (i.e. the user can tentatively test things).

†At least it appears that way on the macro level.

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garrettgillas
I rely on the hover ability heavily on virtually every website on every device
I use. The reason is that I always look at the link's url that pops up at the
bottom before I click on a link. Notice that this is a browser feature & not a
page feature and I depend on it heavily.

I think using hover is perfectly acceptable for displaying information on a
site that users don't need but very well might want. I will concede just as
quickly as anybody else that there is definitely a lot of sites that abuse
this ability. But I think is is unnecessary to suggest abolishing it
completly.

~~~
joshuacc
The difference between this case and other uses of hover is that displaying
the URL doesn't impact the page itself (usually). Instead it is displayed in
an otherwise unused bit of the browser chrome.

~~~
garrettgillas
Maybe I should be more specific. All mainstream desktop browsers do this not
just chrome. In Chrome it pops up, in Firefox/Safari/IE they call it the
"Status Bar" and this is what I'm referring to.

On my mobile browser (Android) It highlights the links for me on mouse over
and highlights phone number in a different color when I use the trackball from
time to time.

The point is that I don't think of this as interference but as something I
have grown to depend on.

~~~
joshuacc
I understand that. The term "browser chrome" means "all the stuff your browser
shows you outside/around the web page itself." Google's browser was named
Chrome because it has very little browser chrome.

------
extension
In the days before the DOM and AJAX, JavaScript could only really do two
useful things: form validation and mouseovers. As "dynamic HTML" came into
use, advanced UI elements were conceptualized simply as more elaborate
mouseovers. Web developers failed to make the association between HTML and GUI
long enough to establish this antipattern.

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jaspero
With more and more people using touch-screens even for non-mobile sites, it is
a bad decision to store information on hover.

Personally, I never liked hover. I think it is one of the most abused
functionality. I agree with the author that if the information is important,
it should be on the screen already.

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DjDarkman
I don't fully agree, you can have a dropdown menu that works for both hover
and click. If it's a desktop user he gets the menu for the hover otherwise he
has to click/touch whatever.

The twitter incident had nothing to do with the overall message.

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Tichy
For a second I thought that robots would finally start to fight for their
rights.

