Suggestion: show help text in mouseover

[mafanasyev-tri]

In the current interface, seeing "what does this button do" (without the use of keyboard) requires 3 steps:

• Mouse-over the button
• Wait until F1 prompt pops up, click on it
• Click again to dismiss the help

Since the message box showing "F1" icon is only slightly smaller than the actual help message, would it be possible to show help message directly instead? Obviously there is no need to dim the rest of the screen in this case, the help box should work just as a regular mouseover popup.

[pkaminski]

I'm not generally a fan of hover popups since they tend to get in the way once you know your way around the UI, and there's no equivalent to hover on touch devices. Also, the help messages are usually significantly larger than the F1 popup and I'd expect anybody doing a code review to be using a keyboard anyway. :) Finally, note that the F1 popup appears near the target only until you've used that feature (or read the help text) -- afterwards, it just shows up subtly in the lower-right corner, where a help-text tooltip wouldn't really make sense.

All that said, I do think there's scope for improving the feature. One thing I might try is including the first sentence of the help text (which usually gives the gist of the target action) in the near-target popup along with an indicator that there's more to show. I think this would help first-time users without unduly burdening experts, and while not touch-compatible it's also not critical so the rest of the help UI could pick up the slack there.

@mikesokolsky