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What should I take into consideration when making a decision about the right transition to use to reveal more info about an item? Do I use a slide-in on hover or flip item on click to reveal more details.

I am assuming that flipping an item on click will accommodate mobile users as they will tap on an information icon to flip the item and reveal more details. I also feel that this could be distraction and a waist of users time. I think that my question is ultimately about a meaningful transition that reveals more details about an item while working well for both mobile and desktop user.

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It's not particularly difficult to support a hover on desktop, but a click on mobile. The more important question is this: what are you hiding?

As my friends at Hot Studio used to tell me (before Facebook ate them), you never want to make the user wait for the UI. As I subsequently tell others, the job of your interface is to inform, not entertain.

Once you require an action in order to reveal information, you've created an additional call to action on the page. Is that CTA important? Or is it competing with something else that is more mission critical? Once you view your pages in terms of competing calls to action, these sorts of questions tend to answer themselves.

Summary: It doesn't particularly matter whether you use a hover or a click, because it's easy to support both. What matters is why you are doing it, and whether or not it's serving a useful purpose on the page.

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  • I guess it does boil down to prioritising content that we need to show with that of the content we could show. This being said, there is a question that runs in parallel and that is around the need to display information in a progressive manner so users are able to anticipate the type and scope of content that lies beyond. In this context transitions become key as they establish a a meaningful relationship between what is displayed upfront and what is displayed upon user input.
    – Okavango
    Jun 9, 2014 at 6:28
  • Now we're getting somewhere. Is this a step based process like a form? (tympanus.net/Development/MinimalForm) or do you need a story telling mechanism (what the slider was originally intended to do before it got abused into irrelevance)?
    – Imperative
    Jun 10, 2014 at 17:41

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