Keeping things simple

This weekend, I had some time to upgrade to the latest version of twitter’s excellent ui library bootstrap.  The upgrade consisted of me modifying the css file to make sure the web app I was working on looked the same way as before.  While doing this, I started to read up on some of the new features of the library and started to play around with them.  One of the things that I saw that was interesting was the tooltip plugin and thought that it would be cool to use this on some of the pages on the application.  The end result was pretty neat, but I had to step back and think about how this would affect the usage of the application.  The tooltip affect felt like it was cluttering the application and in the end I removed it as it would have caused too much confusion on the part of the users of the application.

The moral to this little story is that you should not clutter the user’s workspace with ‘unnecessary’ things that may only confuse/slow them down.  The tooltip plugin is a good thing to have, and I might use it later on in some of the help pages that I am building for the application but for now.