Puncturing balloon tips

New computer, new problems. Going from an old Windows 2000 installation to a fresh install of Windows 2003 means that I have to deal with a number of new annoyances in addition to applying the changes I'm already familiar with. I'm not entirely sure if this annoying message is new for Windows XP/2003 or one I removed early on in Win2k:

I do know that balloon tips were introduced in Windows 2000. In fact, one of the very first things you saw after logging in for the first time was a balloon tip urging you to Click on the Start Button. Back in 1999, writing about a Windows 2000 release candidate, I half-jokingly remarked that talk bubbles did not look particularly Professional (the new name given to the workstation edition of NT 5).

I still stand by that sentiment, but I also believe usability trumps looks in user interface design. Are balloon tips useful? The idea behind this UI element is to allow for a textual notification that calls the user's attention while being less intrusive than a message box. There are two situations in which a balloon tip (or an equivalent UI element) might be appropriate:

• As a one-time hint or explanation for something the user hasn't encountered before and might otherwise have trouble understanding.
• As a notification for an unusual but non-critical condition requiring user action.

The balloon tip about the start button is arguably an example of the former. To ensure that the user has time to read the text, such tips should be displayed until dismissed by a click on the balloon or associated part of the user interface and then never shown again. As a designer your goal should be to make the user interface intuitive enough that such hints are never needed, but this ideal can be hard to reach in practice.

Very few events fit the second description, and correctly identifying such situations can be difficult due to different expectations and use patterns. A balloon tip is too intrusive if the event could be considered part of normal operation or if it can be resolved without user assistance. When immediate user action is needed, the information is critical and a message box or dialog is the proper choice. In most other cases, a log file message or a small status indicator is preferable.

Neither of these criteria allow for the network connection balloon tip in the screenshot above. It's an event that happens every time I start or reboot the computer and most definitely part of normal operation. Finally, the network connection status is already shown through the notification area icon. (I enabled it specifically for this purpose.)

Having justified my reasons for considering this an annoyance I went looking for a way to remove it. There does not appear to be any way to get rid of only this balloon tip, although you can disable all balloon tips in Explorer's notification area through a registry modification. If that sounds like a good idea, locate the following key in the registry:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced

Create a DWORD value named EnableBalloonTips under that key; set it to zero to disable the balloon tips. Alternatively, you may download disable-balloon-tips.reg and import it directly into the registry.

2 November, 2005