Across SolarWinds products, hovers are used to get high-level feedback about a node, application, component monitor, etc. without having to click into a details page. It’s been a while since the User Experience (UX) team designed them, and now, we’re kicking around early concepts for how to make them more useful and efficient for you.
Help us improve hovers by taking a look at the following design idea, reading the short description of how it will work, and then answering the questions that follow. We can’t give everyone who replies points, but we CAN pick one winner at random to get a t-shirt, and everyone who answers will be helping make the SolarWinds user interface better for all!
Current version
For reference, here’s what it looks like when you hover over a node in the node tree right now.
DESIGN IDEA
Unlike today’s hovers, these new hovers would be interactive!
Small hover will be used to identify an object without being overwhelmed by data in a full hover. For example, users will see this small hover when hovering over several objects in a list in rapid succession (as opposed to hovering over a single object for any length of time). In this example, from the hover, you can click to go to actions toy can take or more details.
Large hover will be used any time users hover and leave their cursor hovering over an object slightly longer. In this example, you can click directly on the component monitor, and you can also click to get more detailed information about things like active alerts, shown here. You can also click Actions and More Details, as in the small hover.
QUESTIONS
- Are these new hover designs more useful, less useful, or about the same level of usefulness as the current hovers?
- Why did you give it the rating you gave it in Question 1?
- What kind of actions, if any, would you want to be able to take from the “Actions” on the large hover?
- Where do you want “More Details” to take you?
- In looking at the icons (in the header area of each hover on the far left; the circle by the node in each example; in front of alerts and issues), do they clearly represent identification of status and object type?
- What’s missing that would make these hovers better for you?