Usability: Rethink control elements appearing on mouseover

[wollmers]

The use of a web-application should be as intuitive and self-explaining as possible.

Some experience from other applications can be assumed.

The disadvantages of elements only appearing at mouseover are:

• If not obvious a user must explore the page by moving the mouse across the area.
• The appearing element hides maybe some information.

The advantages are:

• Saves space in the layout.
• Provides information on demand, hides complexity (not in focus for the task).
• Saves clicks.

Candidates, where the behaviour should be removed:

• Configuration settings (disturbing, full menu exists)
• Ticket menu in ticket list view M (medium) and L (large).

Candidates, which would benefit from mouseover:

• Main menu for display of submenus, which many users would expect.
• Same for the avatar, which also has a submenu.
• Other menus with submenus e.g. Ticket Zoom.

[svenoe]

Candidates, where the behaviour should be removed:

* Configuration settings (disturbing, full menu exists)

What exactly do you mean?

* Ticket menu in ticket list view M (medium) and L (large).

Do you mean this?

I think it would be the main reason to use M or L over S, if people do this...

Candidates, which would benefit from mouseover:

* Main menu for display of submenus, which many users would expect.

This can be activated via "OpenMainMenu" in the SysConfig.

* Same for the avatar, which also has a submenu.

Agreed.

[wollmers]

Candidates, where the behaviour should be removed:

* Configuration settings (disturbing, full menu exists)

What exactly do you mean?

This one:

It has a conventional menu:

[wollmers]

Candidates, which would benefit from mouseover:

* Main menu for display of submenus, which many users would expect.

This can be activated via "OpenMainMenu" in the SysConfig.

Good to know;-)

I vote for enabling the setting OpenMainMenu by default.

[wollmers]

* Ticket menu in ticket list view M (medium) and L (large).

Do you mean this?

I think it would be the main reason to use M or L over S, if people do this...

Exactly. M and L including the submenu makes sense. It's the need of mouse-over to display it, instead of always displaying the submenu or have a menu-icon in the upper right corner of each ticket entry.

[bschmalhofer]

Moved this from issues to discussion because the thread was more like a discussion.
Closing the discussion, as there surely will be new discussions about usabilitity.