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it at all.
For this reason, it's important to scatter hints across your site. Whenever
there's something that could seem mysterious if you hadn't used it before,
hints should either appear automatically or be easily accessible, in case the
user needs to know what to do.
Question Mark Icons.
One of the easiest ways of doing this is to put question mark icons next to
things that you think might be confusing. For example, at a website that lets
people pay their water bill, I saw this:
Register for Online Billing
First name: ____
Last name: ____
Account no.: ____ [?]
Notice the question mark next to the input box for account number – this
was provided because, of course, not every customer is likely to know their
account number by heart, or where to find it. Clicking the question mark
popped up an image of a paper water bill, with an arrow pointing to where
the account number could be found. Unless you want customers to wonder
'what account number?', that's the best way of doing things.
Alt Text.
Alt text is the contents of your images' alt tags – that is, text you put in your
image tags' alt properties, like this:
The main purpose of this text is to provide an alternative form of display for
browsers that don't support images, and blind users. However, it also has
another purpose: as 'tooltips', to provide hints. If you have a small icon of a
printer, for example, and clicking it causes the current article to change to its
print CSS and then print, then you make make the alt text look like this:
The Web Design Guide for Newbies |145