Comment 2 for bug 1027825

Michele, thanks for this thoughtful and well-illustrated suggestion.

You listed four distinct issues.

First, few hover effects. This is deliberate. In general, mouseover effects are affordances that you don't get until just after you need them. So we use them only as a last resort, when showing the affordance all the time would be too garish or cluttersome. There are few, if any, cases of that in USC.

Second, no onclick effect on tiles. This is a responsiveness problem, but already reported as bug 1017454.

Third, no onclick effect on the dropdown menus in the navigation bar. This is a problem, and we'd happily accept a fix. But usability testing shows that those menus are confusing in general, so time would be better spent removing them altogether (bug 1020521).

Fourth, no hover effect on list views. This might be a problem, though it has not come up in usability testing. If it is a problem, most of it can be solved by converting most categories and subcategories from list views to tile views (bug 1028106).

But that would still leave list views in a few categories and subcategories, and your suggestion would still apply there. One drawback I can see is that it could interfere with scrolling. A row with "More Info" and "Install" buttons is taller than one without. And if you were scrolling through a list with a trackpad or a mousewheel, the hovered item would be changing rapidly. Combined, that would mean rows were rapidly expanding and collapsing as you scrolled through them, which might be slow and distracting. We could work around that with a delay -- show the hover effect only if you had hovered for at least, say, 250 ms. But that in turn might lead to errors where you meant to click on the next row down, but instead accidentally clicked on a button that had just appeared.

Perhaps others here would like to identify benefits and drawbacks, or to suggest variations.