Mouse-overs pop-ups

glennmagusharvey

I'm not just talking about mouse-over ads; I'm talking about things that show up when you mouse-over them in general.

Why can't y'all web and operating system interface designers realize that this is annoying?  If I want to see an item's properties, I would rather set the display to show its properties or click some drop-down display instead of mousing over and either waiting for a display to come up (and it sometimes won't, sometimes because it thinks my mouse is still moving) or having it pop up immediately and covering up whatever was behind it (and making me have to jump through hoops.

I have never had a situation where I want to see something but only two seconds later.  I either want to see something, or I don't, and it does not change based on whether my cursor is resting on top of an icon.

Roll over to see more?  If I cared to see more, I would click it.  If I don't click it, that means I don't care.

Drop-down menus for major site sections?  If I can mouse over them to make them appear, I can click them just fine.  If they appear instantly, then at the very least they cover up part of the rest of the page.  Worse examples have long mouse-over drop-down menus that exceed the page length...which extends the scroll bar...and then when you reach over to the scroll bar or press arrow down, it disappears, shoving your page back up.  So you have to carefully press down while moving your cursor so that it stays on top of the menu...ugh.

glennmagusharvey

Really?  No one else is bothered by this?  That bugs me.

DYRE

I'm a little bothered by this when I see it (though mostly because half the time they don't even actually work), but really I just don't see it come up often enough for me to care that much about it.  Mostly because I don't really visit a whole lot of websites, so...

Though, now that I think of it, MAL has these and I'm always annoyed by them, so...

Yeah.  I agree.

Mhm.

Evergreen

I am kind of bothered by this. I have met with a number of particularly annoying drop-down menus on websites that I keep losing as I try to navigate a ways over on it.

I wonder how many not-very-computer-literate people have messed up something major or been completely disillusioned from computers because of such annoyances. It's hard enough to instruct such people through even simpler matters, so imagine something more complicated like this...

Icalasari

I don't mind drop down menus

Mind you, I've only encountered either small ones or ones built into the side bar

glennmagusharvey

I just had two more bad experiences with mouse-over pop-ups.  No, it's not anything major, it's just a very minor inconvenience, but still, it serves to support my point.  Neither of them are advertisements--so you can't say they're there to annoy me.

The pages in question:
1. the new GMail look
2. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search-tools/

1. The new GMail look is...kinda meh, but at least they got rid of the stupid "stuff scrolls with the page" thing.  The icons are and lines are now larger, which means that less data is displayed in a given area but it's displayed slightly more clearly.  But my point of complaint here is that the folders and chat now compete for space because they are no longer allowing those to open to a full length or even a decent length since they're stuck at the side of the screen without scrolling.

You either see your e-mail folders, or you see your chat contacts.  If you mouse over one, it'll expand and push out the other.  I know I can adjust this, but even adjusting it is a bit of a pain since if my mouse cursor goes over the line a little bit, the adjustment line zooms out of the way because the page thinks I want to see the other stuff behind it.

Why can't I just be allowed to scroll, damnit?  See, if I can scroll, I don't need to move my mouse cursor, and ANYTIME I DON'T HAVE TO MOVE MY MOUSE CURSOR, THINGS ARE MORE CONVENIENT.  I can scroll by using the edge of my touchpad, by using my arrow keys, by using PgUp/PgDn, and even by pressing space, or for that matter, by clicking the down and up arrows on the scroll bar, by clicking the scroll bar's empty portions, or by clicking the scroll bar's scroll box cursor.  There are SO many more ways to scroll than there are ways to mouse over--if you mouse over, you have to move your mouse to put the cursor on something, and there's no way around it.

I'm already annoyed enough that the GMail interface is very mouse-based, and I can't access features from the keyboard, even if I press tab a million times.  (No, really, if you're chatting with someone, pressing tab will get you absolutely nowhere.  The focus doesn't even move.)

2. I just wanted to use the search box.  I moved the mouse cursor past the search box, because every time you move the mouse cursor, either you do it very slowly or you overshoot and then correct in the blink of an eye; it's the natural way people move mouse-like interfaces.  In going past the search box, my cursor stepped onto the "Other Applications" list.  It's a drop-down menu that automatically opens when you mouse-over it, and now it's covered the search bar.

There's already a little down-arrow.  If I want to see the list, I would go click it anyway.  Why do you have to make it pop up (and cover up something I actually want) upon just mousing over it?

And it's not like there's a point to the link anyway.  When you click "Other Applications" itself (as opposed to any of the stuff that pops up), all it does is just give you the menu, if it didn't pop up right.  So clicking the entire "[ Other Applications v ]" box produces the menu.  That's a big enough target if I want to go there.  If I don't want to go there, you're just annoying me by having it pop up.

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I am curious, is the spate of pop-up menus caused in part by the rise of tablet computers and touchscreen interfaces?

glennmagusharvey

Oh, that does remind me, GMail itself has one of the biggest, most annoying examples of this, and has continuously had this since the appearance of its Chat feature.

When you mouse over a contact, a basic infocard for them pops up, showing their status, avatar/photo, and buttons you can press to mail, chat, or "video & more" them (another drop-up menu, but one that doesn't automatically pop up, thankfully).

Now, if you actually click the contact's name, you either open up a chat thingy with them if they're online or an e-mail to them if they're offline.

Why can't they just make the info click-to-see instead of mouse-over?  Why do I have to not be able to see parts of several of my messages/conversations when I'm looking at the infocard?

(This is even more problematic in that sometimes the infocard that pops up doesn't go away when  you mouse over something else.   You have to go back and mouse over that contact again.)

glennmagusharvey

Another example of a mouse-over interface that sucks because it's buggy is the now-infamous Connecticut Light & Power outage map (made infamous over the course of two natural disasters in just this past year, each with over 750,000 customers left in the dark.

http://outage.cl-p.com/outage/outagemap.aspx

You can mouse over each town to see how many customers there are total and without electricity service.  Problem is, sometimes, the town info pop-up shows up...then immediately goes away because of some unknown reason.

I think it's because for some reason the cursor's active location or whatever is somehow read to be something other than the town you are mousing over.  Most likely, it's counting the cursor as being over the info card that popped up itself.  So it closes the infocard because you're no longer mousing over the town.  But then you are again once it disappears, so it reappears.  But then you're over the infocard rather than the town again, so it disappears again.  And so on, endlessly.

Why can't they just make them click-to-see?

Wicked223

I am curious, is the spate of pop-up menus caused in part by the rise of tablet computers and touchscreen interfaces?

I'm not sure, but that seems like the most likely explanation.

glennmagusharvey

^ I'm not actually sure how that works, to be honest, since I don't use a tablet or smartphone myself, but I just know that the interface design has different requirements, one of which might be that it's harder to scroll but easier to open up different pieces of a mostly-static screen.  And I know that it's much easier to direct one's hand or finger to a spot quickly and precisely than it is to direct a mouse cursor to do the same.

FrodoGoofballCoTV

sometimes, the town info pop-up shows up...then immediately goes away because of some unknown reason.

yeah, that is pretty annoying.  Why can't they just have little pushpins on the map that you click on to see the info?

glennmagusharvey

That's kinda how Mapquest does their traffic incident icons.  Icons on the map that pop up a half-line thingy when you mouse over them, but you can click them for actual details and start and expected end times.  The pop-up-on-click infocard also features an x you can click to close it.

That's much better than just having stuff pop up on mouse-over.