Bill Scott has written a very impressive piece on mouse hovers:

Now that interactions are even more dense, the hover has become our friend to discoverability. We are introducing new idioms to the web space. Things like drag and drop and inline editability are not immediately expected. The hover can provide vital clues to the behavior of an application at the moment the user is curious about it. Hovers are also the lightest event for the user (they just move the mouse.)

Of course, it stills suffers from a lack of affordances and doesn’t change the fact that discoverability requires that users move their mouse, something we’ve often found them reluctant to do. But that all means that you need to provide some other clues, in addition to the hovers, if it is really important that people discover your functionality.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 12th, 2005 at 12:18 pm and is filed under Design, Resources . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.