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I'm working on an web-app which extracts information from user generated tips and reviews about places. Analysing is quite time consuming so extracted data has to be loaded/appended dynamically (sometimes it takes over a minute to analyse all tips from place).

Each extracted chunk has its tooltip showing the whole tip. tooltip

The problem is that it is impossible to show those tooltips on hover while data is still loading, chunks of data are dynamically sorting (as seen in image above) and moving from place to place, tooltip would flicker and hide too fast.

Data change:

data1

data2

What would be the best way to append and sort data dynamically but give user a chance to play with tooltips?

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UPDATE: Ok now that I've seen some "in action". I really recommend to go for a fixed area for the tool tip texts! The user sees its getting more and more (and probably will actually wait for all of it to load -- check this!). Or tries to already click on a label. Then somewhere opens a fixed location with the text. User reads it, when she's done looking back to the dynamic section for an other label, clicks it again, reads the next text and so on. Important is to make clear which labels she already viewed (just like with visited links).

Sorry if I can't provide any studies or so, this is just a solution suggestion and you need to proof the experience with a prototype! One thing to observe would be as I've already said: Do they actually click on anything as long as it still loading? (There is a x of y count that continously counts up so users would probably not even think about already clicking on something)

ORIGINAL MESSAGE: One solution might be to place the tooltip in a fixed area instead of right next to the entry. Since you have a visual cue that this is the selected one, it might work without being visually directly connected.

An other solution might be a kind of "Refresh"-Button, so the dynamic load is being hidden from the user. But I don't prefer this solution because of the technical cognitive model that you apply on the user through this kind of interface. Your users shouldn't be aware of things like data retrieving. The app should just work.

An other way to think about it: Is the dynamic loading really necessary? Can't you just let them wait for a sec longer?

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  • Thanks for quick reply. Answering your question: Unfortunately I can't. Take this place as an example: demo.crowdlistener.ai/… Extracted data is cached in this example and still it loads quite long. Try searching some another place with some amount of tips to analyze and you'll see how long it takes to extract this data. Jul 25, 2014 at 13:37

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