Comment 141 for bug 527458

> My mom&dad have a lot of troubles to understand difference between
> left click, right click& double click. When I guide them over the
> phone to fix something i always tell them "the OTHER click" to get
> their attention to do right click.
>
You will now have to describe the icon to click on (assuming that you
are guiding them to an icon they are not familiar with). Previously,
tooltips provided a way of identifying the item you wanted them to click
on. Now it is more like - click on everything until you find x. Or,
click in the (describe where the indicator applet is) and move your
mouse around until you find x.
> Also my mom does double-click on everything "to make sure it always
> works" cause she doesn't understand that on the desktop icons she
> needs to double click, in the web single click, in skype mostly single
> click, but to call in skype double click.
>
How does this fit in with the original request for bringing back tooltips?
> It is confusing.
>
> About tooltips - they cover information. And it's hard to see which
> item exatly tooltip belongs to. and tooltips cover other icons as well
> making you miss information again!
>
Yes, they temporarily cover information with the information you want.
I think you're wrongly assuming that users are dissatisfied when they
accidentally put their mouse over the Indicator Applet. If this is the
case, is there evidence to show that taking tooltips away is the best
way of dealing with this? A new user would move their mouse over the
Firefox icon and then know what the icon is for. They then "know" that
they can get useful information if they move their mouse over things.
Until they discover the Indicator applet.
> It has been marked as "won't fix" so please stop suggesting readding
> tooltips or providing solutions which go against current AppIndicator
> spec.
>
Does that mean it's impossible to change to "will fix" etc.? (Sorry if
I'm missing something, I'm newish to lp)
> Currently we are trying to identify missing information, whether it is
> important and how to represent it in the new desktop design.
>
>
Good luck with your research, you might want to search Google Scholar
for something similar to "usability tooltips" (without quotes). Quote
from second result and searching the document for tooltip:

We heard general comments about icons and tooltips that included the
following:
"The icons are not immediately obvious" (P2)
"Some of the icons could be more helpful. Icons that work well are
really simple." (P4)
"The icons are not clear." (P6)
"The tooltips make no sense." (P7)

So, users DO use tooltips to identify things (although in this OLD study
tooltips at the time did not have useful information). If research is
old, you will have to determine what bits are relevant.