SharePoint Design Tip: Don’t forget to edit the messages that users see when they “hover” over a web part title

This week, I’ve been doing something I don’t normally do – building the SharePoint sites that I typically design.  As I was configuring web parts, I noticed something that I’d never thought about before – when a user hovers over the title of a web part, the default “help” message that is displayed can be very confusing and should be something that you think about as part of your site design .   For lists and libraries, the help message for the web part is picked up from the Description entered for the list.  If you enter a meaningful description when you create the list or library, it will automatically be displayed in the hover message in the web part.  If you want a different “hover” message, you can edit the Description in the web part (found in the Description field in the web part editor (under “Advanced”).
   
But, when the web part doesn’t start from a list or library, the hover messages can be really confusing.  For example, the default message for a Content Editor web part is “Use for formatted text, tables, and images.”  I guess this might be helpful to the person configuring a site, but once the site is turned over to end users, this message is pretty useless and should be re-written to a more meaningful value.

As part of the site designs that I create going forward, I’m now going to add a specification for each web part to indicate what the “hover” message should be.  For some Content Editor web parts, I will probably just delete the value for Description because no help text is needed.  For others, I’ll write something more descriptive.  The default descriptions provided in SharePoint all include verb phrases, such as “Use to display links on your web page that can be grouped and styled and can be organized by dragging and dropping” for the Summary Links web part.  You will also need to decide how you want descriptions to be written for your site and write them consistently for all lists, libraries, and web parts.  I prefer a help message that describes what the user sees, not what the list or library is used for.  For a Summary Links web part, I would prefer a description such as “Shows key links for our teams grouped by business topic.” You should choose whatever format works for your site users, but whatever you choose, create a standard and write the descriptions consistently for all elements of the site.