Last modified: 2013-10-16 01:29:09 UTC
Tooltips generally do overlap other things being popups and all, but the particular colouring, styling, and behaviour of these makes them look quite odd when covering up pieces of the 'Why create an account?' as they do not strictly pop up so much as just appear in the space to the right, an appearance that is only emphasised as such by the flat styling employed. If they are going to do this, there should be adequate space for them to do so without overlapping the 'Why create an account?' items. Otherwise, they would need to look and act more like traditional popups for it to make sense.
As you say, tooltips generally do overlap other content, and we went through several iterations on the tooltip design, so we were aware of that fact. You don't redesign the persistent content of a Web page to accommodate interactive error messages, which most users shouldn't see anyhow. You design error messages to jive with the contents of the page when and if they appear. (So say, pushing the benefits out of the way to make room for tooltips at all screen resolutions, is not something I am going to recommend we implement.) If you look at this compared to the style of the GuidedTour tooltips, you'll immediately see that simply adding drop shadow isn't quite enough to ensure readability. Choosing color fill in backgrounds for the tooltips was our choice here, and I think we hit on a decent one considering in remote tests users had no trouble identifying and reading the tooltips. I'm going to leave this bug open because we'll probably keep tinkering with the tooltip appearance as we productize, but I think it's perfectly fine for now.
And these do not jive with the contents of the page - they are indeed rather jarring. The appearance suggests that they are a part of the page, not above it, and the layout should be more than capable of accommodating that without them winding up on top of things, especially given that appearance. They may stand out sufficiently for usability, and that is good, but we can and should be striving for more than pure functionality and make things look nice as well. Aesthetics are not something to rule out or ignore, especially as they also increase user happiness regardless of the function itself. I have not seen GuidedTour, but if you believe it could use a visual look-over I would be more than happy to do so with that as well.
This extension is no longer deployed, and the account creation UX changes tested therein are merged in core.
