It's your call, of course, though I don't really see how adding tooltips to the top UI bar is more disruptive than all of the other places that you have tooltips - e.g., the edit box in which I'm writing this as well as pretty much everything item the default dashboards. I also note that in almost every other part of the UI where you use icons, Phabricator is pretty exemplary in either having tooltips or an explanatory text next to the icon, so it just seems like an odd omission to me not to have it in the top UI.

I'd add that it is not just Day 1 users that see this as a problem. I've watched even users who've been using Phabricator for a few months stumble over this sort of thing several times, since the icons used by Phabricator are not exactly universal (e.g., the help and logout icons), so if you're not using it everyday or switch a lot between different tools, it seems like it's very easy to lose familiarity with which icons mean what.

I don't expect help/logout/settings to survive the top nav re-design if we add flags/bookmarking.

Ah. I guess you're thinking along the lines of adding a drop-down menu or something else as a replacement? That would probably be a big improvement on the current UI for our users of the type described above.

Thanks for taking the time to respond.