Ever since Apple released the iPhone, it seems that everything has suddenly gone touchscreen, with copycat mobile phones all including touchscreen interfaces. These better quality devices mean you can get the “real web” on your mobile (unlike the time of WAP and a numeric keyboard to navigate around the page). It’s worth pointing out that this brings us a new usability consideration for the web that we’ve never had before.
Some sites have content and features which appear only after you hover over them. This isn’t a new technique, many years ago web designers would make use of the fact that Internet Explorer would show an image’s alt attribute in a tooltip when you hover over it to show more content, and this feature is still here if you use the title attribute of links. Javascript gives you even more choice; some drop down menu solutions work by hovering over menu items, and yours truly has been guilty of using jquery to display tooltips containing extra bits of information.
Don’t get me wrong, I think that this is a great thing. It allows the designer to keep the page clutter free and in some cases is a very helpful interface interaction. But we need to remember that you can’t hover on a touch screen interface.
By including content that can only be displayed on a mouse hover, we are ignoring a growing market of users that browse the web on mobile devices while out and about. But is this information important? Can they get to it by other means?
Am I saying to not make use of hover techniques? Far from it, hover is a useful gesture whose uses are limitless. But we need to be mindful of touch screen devices, and consider making an alternative stylesheet or using other javascript methods for these users if the information is important and isn’t available elsewhere.