Popover

These popovers can appear with or without a heading. For accessibility reasons our popovers are designed to only be dismissed using the close button, or by re-selecting the element that triggered them.

User experience

Popovers can retain helpful information to supplement a task or function. However, we don't recommend you hide critical information in popovers. Always surface important or critical information on the page or screen so it’s discoverable and not hidden behind an interaction. Be wary of how popovers are used on mobile devices, or how they would work when users are using browser zoom or ZoomText to access your content. Popovers can obscure other content or functions, and be difficult to show reliably at smaller screen sizes. Alternatively, consider using a show/hide (collapsible element) or accordion.

We recommend only using popovers when absolutely necessary, to consider the language you are using, and try to word things in such a way as to not require supplementary text.

Visual design

Popovers are designed to be small overlays of content housing secondary information. They are often used to elaborate on terms or provide additional information/explanation to labels etc. Given that most of our interfaces are content heavy popovers have been designed to clearly stand out above the underlying content as a result they are intentionally more pronounced than most UI elements in the GUI.

Dos and don’ts

• Do keep information simple and succinct.
• Avoid changing the styles of popovers (borders, colours, size etc).
• Avoid using too much information inside the popover especially when designing responsive web apps.