There are many situations, where we would like to show the user “just a bit” more information depending on their current focus. Today, some widgets have (light) tooltips, mostly restricted to a static text. And for those that don’t have any tooltip, we need to define on-click events that open up overlays. This leaves the user with no first-class experience due to:
overlays requires the users to click a button
drawer overlays are in most cases not where the users’ visual focus is (i.e. they look at a button/metric card/object list - but the drawer opens left/right/top/bottom). Also a drawer opening can feel like a slight punch in the face depending on the size.
modal overlays definitely feel like a punch in the face , especially with shadow background activated
To give the users a more targeted experience of accessing additional information, I would love to be able to define custom tooltips on any widget. In detail my ideas are:
new overlay layer type “tooltip”
behaves like modal overlay, where we can embedd whatever section/module/widget we would like - but it simply opens in-place of the hovered widget/object. I.e. like the tooltip on filter pills or metric cards.
orientation: auto, left, right, top, bottom. Auto derives based on the location of the widget and the size of the to open section the best orientation.
color (black/white): just like how i.e. descriptions are black, but tooltips of filter pills are white
closing behaviour: cursor leaving the section, backdrop click, close button
new on-hover events to be configured on any widget. In this case the on-hover event would be to “show tooltip xyz”
to properly cover object lists/tables, we would also need the hovered object (just like how we already have the selected object). There already seems to be some hover events, since the text is shown as tooltip if the text is extending the space. Please just give us the object itself
We are currently in the process of allowing button group description tooltips to be variable backed, which will be followed up with the same for metric cards. No timeline to promise yet, but it is in progress. Going forward I think you can expect to see less options where only static strings are offered in favor of almost always allowing the flexibility of choosing a string variable.
I think our preference for now is to add tooltips specifically in the widgets needed. I can see how perhaps you want a markdown widget for some rich text formatting in a tooltip, but many widgets which have interaction would not be appropriate to place in a tooltip so I think we’d be hesitant to open up to arbitrary content being placed in a tooltip.
For the object table, the recommended workflow for now would be to open a panel to the side of the table showing more information about a selected object.
I think we’re fairly far off from actioning this request, but we have seen some other signal for custom tooltips in Workshop where I’m noting this for signal! Thank you for thinking through how you would like this to work.
I agree that not every widget would need these, however having a new layer like this would give us HUGE flexibility. If you ask me for a priority, I would say higher priority are widgets users “act” with like metric card/button > object list/table > charts (if at all)
Let me spark some more light what concrete features we have in mind:
we would use a metric card to show e.g. the count of unread messages. On hover, we show a preview by looping through the comments. The users could decide from here to either reply directly or go to a chat page.
or we would embedd a small summary analysis on a metric card. Again purpose would be to show a quick summary for users to decide if they want to further dive into.
At the end of the day you are PD and the decision on which features to action on is all with you. I can just give you my honest feedback what I believe as passionate builder would best equip us to provide our users with first-class products
, especially with shadow background activated
