Tooltips in the era of touch

Question

Tooltips are an incredibly useful interface paradigm to know an application. They are the mapping between the visual control and the application specific action associated t

Answer 1

Keeping in mind that hover tooltips are terrific help for beginners and they need no action to learn for them because beginners are always slow and they pop up while insecure moving the cursor. On the other hand, they are excellent because they do not slow down the power users.

For tablets I would pick up the idea of the question mark but add some more complexity:

1) When you tap on the question mark, it switches on the "Help" mode. 2) you can then tap on the control in question and it shows the tooltip. 3) if you then tap on the same control again, it terminates the help mode and executes what ever the control should do. 4) if you tap on any other control, it shows the his tooltip and the help mode keeps switched on. 5) one can terminate the help mode by tapping the question mark again.