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These have irritated me for a while now, and recently I've actually gone and compiled some of them.

Why do web designers do this? That's one thing I haven't quite settled yet.

I feel that they make little difference in a webpage, but the tiny extent that they do is negative on average. They make certain functions ever so slightly faster since you don't have to click, and I guess that also means your mouse button wears out ever so slightly less quickly.

However, this is counterbalanced by page features popping up and obscuring other things, causing various problems. The way I tend to use mice/touchpads/nipples/etc. (and the way I'm pretty sure most everyone else does) is to move fast and overshoot the target and then correct slightly, almost instantly. But when you have mouse-over pop-up features, they have a decent chance of obscuring what you actually wanted to do something with, and then you have to move the cursor further away just to get it to disappear again and then move closer again.

For example:

• In GMail, mousing over a contact's name in the Chat box will produce an infocard showing the person's name, avatar, and buttons to click to chat with or e-mail the person. This infocard automatically obscures part of your window. The part it obscures--the senders of a few of your conversations--is very likely not what you're working with, if you want to chat...but if you actually just wanted to hit a message's checkbox, but overshot into the Chat box, you'll have to move your cursor back away from the whole general area in order to get the infocard to disappear and stop covering the message you wanted to work with. And sometimes, there's a bug that causes the infocard to not disappear until you mouse over the contact you moused over, again.
• In Windows 7, a new feature allows you to preview the appearance of a window from the taskbar, by mousing over its taskbar entry/rectangle/box/whateveryoucallthat. Unfortunately, this preview appears immediately when yo mouse-over. So if you wanted to work with something at the bottom of a maximized window, you have two options: overshoot fast enough so that the mouse-over preview doesn't even appear and then correct over a small distance, or move slowly. This becomes especially disorienting if you then mouse-over the preview...which, after less than half a second, then shows you the window whose preview you're mousing over...and you are still trying to look for the feature on the window that was supposed to be on top in the first place.
• The Connecticut Light & Power outage map lets you mouse over each town to see what the outages are in that town. This would be fine and dandy except the designer seems to have written the page badly, so that the pop-ups occasionally "flash", coming on and going back off, sometimes repeatedly. I think what happens in those cases is that you mouse-over a town, it immediately pops up a box showing the outages in that town, then the page thinks you're no longer mousing over the town for some reason, then closes the box. If you move the cursor a pixel, though, it notices that you're over the town again, and once again produces the town, and the flash repeats.

I guess some of these issues could be fixed if you added a little time delay to the mouse over (including some to keep it on the screen), so that you can be more sure that the user actually wants to focus on whatever it is (and then can take it in). But that does suggest this question: Why have a mouse-over feature at all? If a user is interested enough in something, can't the user just click it? Why can't I just be left to click a drop-down menu if I want to see its contents? Because I'm more than willing to make a simple click (or even a double-click) if I intend to use a feature, but if I don't want to, the mouse-over pop-up is just going to annoy me and take up processing power and possibly obscure what I want to do. Just leave a ltitle arrow or chevron on drop-down/drop-up menus and I'll be fine with clicking them. I'll click on features that I want to investigate further.

Is the prevalence of mouse-over features at all related to the rise of tablet computers, smartphones, and other touch-based interfaces? Since one possible reason I can think of, especially relevant to the newest example from GMail, is that it might be easier to touch or drag open a part of an otherwise static display than to scroll the whole page up or down. But for situations where scrolling is not a problem, I just don't see the reasoning. Anyone have a better explanation?

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For what it's worth, if you really want pop-up stuff for speed, Mapquest provides a pretty good example in its live traffic data. Mouse-over a sign indicating a cause of slowdown and you'll get a half-line summary of it ("incident cleared on I-95 SB...", "long-term construction on..." etc.), but only if you click it will a whole paragraph of information be displayed. And it'll come with a little "x" button you can click to make that on-click-pop-up infocard disappear when you're done.

This post has been edited by Glenn Magus Harvey on 8th December 2011 02:55

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Check the "What games are you playing at the moment?" thread for updates on what I've been playing.

You can find me on the Fediverse! I use Mastodon, where I am @[email protected] ( https://sakurajima.moe/@glennmagusharvey )

I don't generally care for mouse-over features, especially if they're immediate. I know a few sites whose navigation is just so that if you accidentally mouse over a tab, a huge dropdown menu will pop up that's in the way of what you're trying to click on, which makes it frustrating. Especially if it's something like a bank, or a college website you need to access regularly.

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You're telling me that there's no hope.

I'm telling you you're wrong.

I get this issue on a FreeForums site I frequent. Between the bottom response of a topic and the Post Reply button, there's a little bit of inconspicuous text that says "Share This". Hovering over the text, even for a fraction of a second, makes a menu pop up. It doesn't open over the Post Reply button, though... it just disables everything else until you manually close the pop-up window by clicking on the "X" on the pop-up.

... which happens to be above the Post Reply button and the Share This text... >_<"

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Thank you for taking the time to read this sign. This sign loves you.

Quote (GMH)

Why do web designers do this?  That's one thing I haven't quite settled yet.

Well, you probably won't settle it. Just like any design pattern, they're done for different reasons for different people. It could be that it's genuinely the easiest way to get at a particular piece of information. Or it could be that actually clicking the element already has an assigned function, and adding a hover-state action enables the developer to neatly provide another chunk of info to help the user decide what to click (this is the reason I've had most often when developing such a device). It could be used to directly avoid making the user click through to another entire webpage to get more information, which is time-consuming for users with slower connections, and more costly in terms of taxing the webserver. Or it could be just to add an extra layer of interaction to punch up the user experience. Definitely no one-size-fits-all explanation to it.

Quote (GMH)

I feel that they make little difference in a webpage, but the tiny extent that they do is negative on average.

I'd guess that you're probably in the minority on that, at least among people who can differentiate between good implementations and bad implementations, but you did say that it was just the way you felt, so I certainly wouldn't say you were wrong.

With regards to your examples, I don't have much of a problem with the first two - for GMail, I just hid chat entirely because I don't use it. For Win7, I think that's only an issue if you're using Aero skins, isn't it? I don't. The boxes that appear for me in that case are small enough that they don't bother me in the least. The bug you mention on your local powerco's site, though, that drives me nuts. You're right, it's simply bad developing. Not even that hard to avoid.

Quote (GMH)

I guess some of these issues could be fixed if you added a little time delay to the mouse over (including some to keep it on the screen), so that you can be more sure that the user actually wants to focus on whatever it is (and then can take it in).

Devs who use jQuery, of which I am one, have access to a plugin to make that easy, when it's desired. I'm sure other JS frameworks have similar stuff, and even if you're just working with vanilla JS, yeah, you can do that.

Quote (GMH)

I'll click on features that I want to investigate further.

One of the examples for reasoning I mentioned earlier describes why that won't always work. It's a perfectly good thing to expect when clicking an element doesn't actually do something different, though.

Quote (GMH)

Is the prevalence of mouse-over features at all related to the rise of tablet computers, smartphones, and other touch-based interfaces?

Touch-based interfaces don't tend to have hover states. How can a touchscreen know where your finger is hovering?

Quote (Relm)

I know a few sites whose navigation is just so that if you accidentally mouse over a tab, a huge dropdown menu will pop up that's in the way of what you're trying to click on, which makes it frustrating.

That ends up, to my mind, being less a problem with the mouseover effect than the fact that someone didn't hire an information architect when planning the site. If you have a navigation so large that it completely overwhelms the actual content when it appears, in a way that goes beyond simply having to twitch the mouse away and back, then you didn't plan your site sections very well.

Quote (Lily)

Between the bottom response of a topic and the Post Reply button, there's a little bit of inconspicuous text that says "Share This".

Yeah, the Share This plugin is really obnoxious about that. That's a great example of what SHOULD be an action that happens only on click, where it would still work just as intended. But since they're a company that makes their money off of generating traffic through their service, they certainly want to make it as obvious and obnoxious as possible!

To sum up, for me, it's just another development tool. Some purists won't like it because in a lot of cases they can be used to show content to a user that can't be seen elsewhere if the javascript on the page is broken or turned off. But, to me, it's just another tool. If you use it for a reason that the majority of your users will appreciate, it can be a very useful one. But it's no different than using a screwdriver as a hammer - it might well work but that doesn't mean you should make it plan A.

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"To create something great, you need the means to make a lot of really bad crap." - Kevin Kelly

Why aren't you shopping AmaCoN?

What you say about revenue is probably a big piece of it; I know that roll-over ads that start playing a video with sound (including downloading the darn thing, especially annoying if you're on a slow connection) are among the most obnoxious examples of mouse-over features.

I see what you mean by providing information to the user in a way that isn't obnoxious but does come automatically--or at least more automatically than does display-on-click, since it's a slightly bigger deal psychologically to click something than to mouse over it.

I recently did find yet another example: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search-tools/ . On that page, the "Other Applications" drop-down menu obscures then entire text entry area of the search box when it's opened. I guess that the issue with that page is bad organization, once again? since either feature can be moved so that the drop-down doesn't overlap the search box.

That said, I think that page is also an example of where the drop-down menu is unnecessary, in my opinion: If you click "Other Applications", it does nothing; that "link" only exists to create a drop-down menu. Unless a click-to-drop-down menu is loaded from the server only when clicked, I don't see why it would be that hard to make it click-to-drop-down rather than mouse-over-drop-down.

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Check the "What games are you playing at the moment?" thread for updates on what I've been playing.

You can find me on the Fediverse! I use Mastodon, where I am @[email protected] ( https://sakurajima.moe/@glennmagusharvey )