WYSIWYG-Tool Tips: Enhancing Tool Tips with Translucent Preview Bitmaps

This paper suggests to enhance the concept of tool tips by presenting translucent preview bitmaps. The basic idea is to give the user a preview of what would happen when a certain operation is invoked. We have implemented two prototypes to evaluate the concept. One provides WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) tool tips for documents and applications on the desktop. The second one is an application that provides previews of dialogs while browsing through the menu. Initial experience shows that this can provide a benefit for the user as she or he sees what is going to happen rather than only providing feedback on what has happened. This is in particular of interest to actions that can not be undone.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ISVC
• Authors: Heiko Drewes, Albrecht Schmidt
• Keywords: Basic Idea, ISVC 2005, Tool Tips, Translucent Preview Bitmaps