User:Severin/HIG Proposal/Tooltips

UI Tooltip Guidelines

WIP These rules are not valid, yet. This page will get updated when they are!

Introduction

Tooltips in Blender serve as hints to provide the user more information about the tool a button represents in a quick, easy and usual way. To ensure that these are of a high quality, we need to specify some guidelines and follow these strictly.

Links: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dn742443.aspx

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General rules

What tooltips should contain

• The name of the tool
• A description of the tool (see below!)
• If a button is disabled, the tooltip should always show useful information on why it is disabled and ideally how to change that.
• Additional useful info (Shortcuts, Python path, etc. - Automatically generated)

What tooltips should not contain

• Code snippets
• Anything with very involved details (e.g. troubleshooting, corner cases that might not work, etc.)

The tool description

The description of the tool should basically be short and to the point. But there are more rules to follow:

• Do not use more than a couple of lines, try to stick with two or three.
• Use full sentences (periods and commas are allowed).
• Examples of situations where you might use the tool are allowed.
• Avoid using the described term to explained itself.