For what widgets would you want to have a tooltip? I can see the case for icons in toolbars without text. What about for buttons with labels? Hopefully the label clearly communicates what the buttons does, but what if you want to give more info about the button?
If you do use them, I'm concerned that the user will expect other UI widgets have them. If the mouse over something and there's no tooltip, will this lead to a bad user experience?
Answer
If a button, label, or icon has little to no descriptive text or needs some short explanation, then a tooltip works well for this. You can see examples of this all throughout this StackExchange web app, in fact. If we didn't have tooltips on all these up & down arrows next to each answer, some people might think they're for scrolling.
But if the text you use in a tooltip is a redundant rehash of the label, then it's pointless. The unfortunate thing about tooltips is that they cover up the area underneath them. So excessive tooltips can become annoying to the user, especially if the user is trying to ignore them anyway.
Also, if the tooltip is beyond a certain length that the user is going to read, then you really need some other mechanism. After all, the tooltip is only going to be visible for a few seconds.
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