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There used to be not-well-liked (by designers, or users) help system, which when the user toggled it on, would display a description of purpose what you pointed at, and — when very well implemented — an explanation of why an disabled. It was called Balloon Help. Unfortunately, it had no idea what you already knew, and would continue popping up bubbles until you turned it off. Of course, there was a fair chance that within seconds of turning it off, you would want info on something again. So, you'd mouse over to small global icon for it, pull down a menu, choose enable, and then it would gleefully show balloons for much of what your pointer passed over on your way to the one thing yow needed help with…and again on the way back to the menu toggle to shut it off. But eventually, some kind person invented a system hack that made it turn on for just the duration that you held a modifier key, and it was glorious. For users, at least. For programmers, it was still annoying, because you were supposed to create all those descriptions: one for each enable control or interesting element and, to do it Properly™ one for each possible reason that the given widget was disabled. Most users never got to experience the modifier-key method. Most developers, if they implemented it, only provided the item descriptions, without bothering with the disabled state. Microsoft decided to partially imitate Balloon Help by providing, and asking third parties to provide, a tiny question-mark button in each dialog box. Clicking it let you then click any one item to get a description of it. Which was annoying when you wanted to know about multiple items. And more annoying when many or all of the items you clicked didn't have descriptions. If you weren't in a dialog window, yow were supposed to use the program's Help option, which was completely different. Both Balloon Help and question-click-help eventually were replaced by that unfortunate idea: a smallish floating window that is simultaneously too small to show the content (often having scrollbars in both directions) and too large to get out of your way. With seemingly nothing satisfying available, help systems continue to diverge, offering varying degrees of utility like local HTML that opens in a web browser (often slow to launch), actual online web pages (useless if not connected), sidebars that resize your workspace and open sluggishly, and animated talking characters that won't accept "Go away!" for an answer (::shudder::)… On the whole, I'd take something like "Balloon Help with modifier key", except for when a tutorial would be more appropriate. … But back on topic of grey buttons, other terrible-but-trending designs are "everything is light/medium grey" (makes everything look disabled), "one or more enabled elements are fancy/coloured while one or more equally enabled elements are grey" (often used when the greyed options are "Obviously what any sane user would want, but that negatively affects some target metric"). |