Do we need to, and if so how can we avoid misleading titles?

Question

Does a rollover that replaces content with an icon help user understand the role of a button? was a question asked recently, and what bothers me about it is that the title is not an accurate representation of the content. The content of the quesiton and the answers are about whether their particular rollover helps users understand the role, as oppposed to rollovers with icons in general.

Is this a bad thing? The main problem I see being that when searching for it, you may click on it expecting one thing and get another. Also, IIRC the duplicate question search only displays the title, so this may cause accidental duplicate marks.

If so, how can we avoid it in the future?

Answer 1

I don't think the title was misleading here. It is a good title, and the question illustrates and example of that situation. Sure, the answers may be a bit too focused on that specific issue rather than the concept a whole (although most answers are still useful to the general idea) but I don't think it's a problem. You can apply the logic from that specific situation to most other situations involving the hover-over-button-changing-to-icon concept.

Questions should be broad enough to be relevant to a wide range of people rather than just the asker (hence why we don't allow things like "please review my UI" posts) but still need to be specific enough to be relevant to a particular situation that other people are likely to face. This question seems to hit the mark pretty accurately in my opinion.