Imagine a city without any road signs, where everyone has no way to get visual guidance, all people and vehicles can only move forward in chaos, friction and conflict will be everywhere. A city without guidance is like a black box.
In the same way, an app with cool functions and effects, if there is no new user guidance process, no tooltips, and no basic teaching, will be as confusing and headache as a city without road signs.
This analogy may not be so precise, but it should be easy to understand.
The saddest part is that when users feel pain because of the chaotic experience, it will not call customer service for consultation or leave a message in the background to ask questions. Most users will choose to close and uninstall the APP directly, and a small number of users will Uninstall it after scolding on social media or in the comment area.
Good looks will be attractive, but usability must be guaranteed until then. Even if the best practices are used in the design, not all functions and services are clear at a glance, and users will not be able to instantly understand the navigation and the specific characteristics of each functional module every time.
That's why you need onboarding flows for new users, you need tutorials for beginners, you need tooltips. With these links, designers can guide users to have a basic understanding of the functions or usage of the product, so as to avoid users getting lost in the functions they are not familiar with at the beginning. Twenty years ago, our newly bought washing machines, TVs and radios would be accompanied by a small thick manual. Now, these commonly used home appliances already have better interactive design and better new users. In the guidance mode, users usually only need to provide some core instructions and basic user guidance, and users can perform basic operations. And these are the most common tooltips.
Tooltips are a very common and useful user guidance strategy in the new user process of today's apps. Tooltips are widely used in the onboarding process of new users as an annotation-like presentation of tutorial/guide information.
1. Why use tooltips?
When you need to display the core functions of the product, tooltips can provide a more interactive and more free display method. However, in the onboarding flow of many products, tooltips are abused and overloaded with information, making b2b data tooltips a very annoying feature.
In Google's Material Design design rules it says:
Tooltips should be displayed when the user hovers, focuses, or touches a control. Usually, tooltips are described for a specific element, and it will contain brief text to explain its function, effect or interaction. For example, it may explain the function involved in an icon in the form of text. However, a tooltip is just a hint, it does not replace a specific function.
So, how do you avoid making tooltips really work and not feel like information overload? Here are a few tips to make it really work.
2. Display one prompt at a time
Displaying too much information at one time is one of the main reasons why tooltips feel like information overload. Try to provide one effective hint at a time, so that users can easily understand and not feel irritated. Here is the tooltip for Hotjar: