Regardless of terminology, I’m very appreciative of the detailed tooltips on your stacks. It often saves a trip to your site and digging around the demo / instructions.
I’m in the same boat as Scott where I’m just behind the ball on some of your stacks. Not a reflection in how they’re supported, they’re often just full of application and it can take me a while to realize where they could/should be applied
my to 2 cents:
I am not a native speaker and can not really distinguish if your (Tavs´) words are just “somehow different” or if my english is just not good enough to fully understand everything correctly – for example (and especially) within the tooltips of the stacks settings.
my impression is:
In comparison to the tooltips of other devs I find it more difficult to understand/follow your explanations.
Your sentences tend to be much longer and containing much more information than what I am used to when working with other stacks from other developers.
Maybe that´s just a non native speaker problem…? I don’t know.
I wonder how difficult it is for a native speaker (Tav) to evaluate what is easy or difficult to understand for a non native speaker who is reading the tooltips…?
Just imagine teaching a little child – maybe that would make it easier for the rest of us to understand what you mean ? ;)
Of course one has to consider the complexity of the stacks which may lead to more complex tooltips automatically…?
After watching your video tutorials I use to go “ah”, “crystal clear”, “look how easy that is” and so on. I watch you going through the settings making changes here and there and – that might be the trick (?) – leaving lot´s of settings to it´s defaults.
If I would record a video of the way I go through the settings you would witness me inspecting nearly every setting and option and playing around like a kid. could you please add a “revert to stacks default settings button”? :D
Thanks @Papart that is very useful and constructive.
I do have some verbose tooltips for sure, I think they tend to be the ones where I am trying to stress something important or where it is an advanced setting.
The tooltip system is also a bit limited so for example, where we have 4 buttons or 3 number inputs, they all have to share one tooltip.
I will concentrate on making them as clear and simple as possible though.
I think this is the best advice I would give for any stack or indeed any technology. Don’t start clicking and changing things for the sake of it. Well designed technology should default to the most common use case and rarely need huge numbers of settings to be changed together.
I would love to do this but unfortunately it is not possible within the Stacks API. To return everything to default the only option is to drop in a fresh copy of the stack.
This sentence works as a good example to illustrate, what could be challenging for non native speakers to understand, since you use a somehow exotic expression: “verbose”.
It´s okay while we are on a forum right now - but just as a showcase/example in order to point you towards aspects that non native speakers might get in trouble when reading e.g. tooltips.
I was not able to translate “verbose”, although I can get what you want to express by reading the rest of the content of the entire sentence. But that is not what you are after - I guess you want the people to understand you without doubt, guessing etc.
So, if your post was an tooltip with the word “verbose” in it, I would recommend to just use “wordy” instead, or (remember: “talk to a kid”) say something like “I have some tooltips with a lot of text…”
I bet you could decrease your support requests by “just” simplifying your wording a bit.
I can’t easily change the way I speak English I’m afraid, until you pointed it out, I had no idea that verbose would be considered “exotic”.
In an ideal world, all the tooltips would be multilingual but we are not there yet.
I’m not totally convinced with the “talk to a kid” argument. I think many users would find that condescending regardless of their native tongue. All good feedback though.
I am sure you are doing your best to make everything as simple as possible - no doubt!
and I am very pleased that you took notice at all of my insignificant statements regarding “tooltip wording”.
If I were a stack I would definitely try to marry you! haha.
Ha.
Now, I have spent the evening looking through tooltips trying to spot complex wording. I can’t for the life of me find anything with “exotic” words or even unclear language.
This is of course not surprising as I wrote them!
Can I therefore have some concrete examples of where you think I have crossed the line from informative to confusing. Thanks
You see, I’ve never even noticed the Blog page before and didn’t realise you used it to summarise the functionality of new stacks. I just saw announcements on the forums, then went to the main page and worked through the stacks on that. I’ll be sure to check through all the blog entries in future.
I also didn’t realise you had a YouTube channel (I’ve now subscribed).
This has been a real eye opener for me and I’m glad I asked the question (I see the blog entry for ‘New Blueprint stack’ actually poses the question - what’s the difference between BluePrint and SectionsPRO?
Many thanks,
8-)
There is a Vimeo channel as well if you prefer to avoid the Google poison:
https://vimeo.com/bigwhiteduck
sorry for messing up your evening. that was not my intention.
I understand your point and would really like to paste in a list of things to double check - but unfortunately I have never taken any notes when I failed to understand or achieve something. I will take notes in the future.
I just flew over SP settings and must admit, that I couldn’t´t find anything suspicious.
(There is a little typo in sections – margins / background offset by the way)
The only thing I noticed:
it doesn´t help that the tooltips (in general) fade away after a couple of seconds. that makes reading (and understanding) tooltips with rather debose text difficult for me. (which you might use more often than others due to complexity)
Unortunately it´s not possible to copy the tooltip text to read it elsewhere or to hold click or something like that in order to avoid the fade-out effect. (or am I overseeing some trick?)
debose texts can be found here:
Section Flexible Height / proportional / Content Control or section setup/ priority
persons like me might need some time to understand them. but I am not seeing that changing the words would change this for me in this particular case.
I find your use of the word “exotic” both confusing, and a little bit arousing.
No, the tooltips are controlled by MacOS. The only thing you can do is to take a quick screenshot with cmd-shift-4
thanks for this - I also haven´t noticed that! I am subscriber no.99, now.
haha. :D
maybe the discussion would benefit from native speakers trying to explain where they see “difficult language” in Tavs Universe.
Only one more subscriber and I can get a custom YouTube url. My joy is unbridled.
Now the big G will start keeping a a closer eye in you for sure. 😜
This is starting to feel like a witch hunt! As the person who first mentioned a difference, key word there: DIFFERENCE. Not DIFFICULT, in the way Tav names and describes things, can I just say I feel this one throwaway comment by me has been blown out of all proportions and feels like it’s starting to morph into an issue with Tav. That’s absolutely not the case and not the intention of my comment above.
In short, I’d rather distance myself and the comment I made above from the direction this thread is being pushed.
i never intended to start a witch hunt. My apologies if it appears like this!
And I surely didn´t want to discredit Tavs stacks/work/language in any way at all.
I just tried to explain my personal thinking about ONE aspect why Tavs´stacks sometimes could possibly appear more difficult to the average user than others. That´s the impression I get when reading in forums and alike. I wanted to add constructive feedback from the point of view of such an average user.
I guess my english isn´t good enough to precisely express myself correctly in this case and therefore causing misunderstandings. Because I don´t want that, I´m out at this point.
Sorry if I bothered anyone!
No apologies needed - I asked what could be improved and I have listened to all suggestions above.
I am also somewhat pleased that my original thought that it was more perception than real complexity seems for the most part to be true,.