Instructional vs Informative: Two Kinds of Tooltips You Should Know
In the past five years, digital products live and die by quick and frequent feature releases and the success of product teams is often measured by the speed and timing of these releases.
While a new feature presents an opportunity to add value to users, its adoption is an equally critical success factor for any product team.
But a feature will only see significant adoption if users are aware and start actively using it.
This is why feature discoverability becomes an important part of driving feature adoption.
Among the several strategies that product teams deploy to facilitate feature discovery, the use of tooltips for in-product education is popular and prevalent in web and mobile apps.
Tooltips are simple annotations that are used to explain something without intruding or obstructing the user experience — usually triggered when a user lands on a page or after an interaction with an element.
What makes them so popular?
According to the NN/g, “web users are notorious for not reading, and mobile users tend to be even worse due to limited time and fragmented attention.”
Since digital apps don’t come with an instruction manual, they deploy tooltips instead — it is more effective to focus on a single interaction rather than attempting to explain every possible area of the user interface.
By minimizing the amount of information on a tooltip, product teams can direct a user’s attention on a single, primary action or point of interest.
By its function, a tooltip can be of two kinds - informative and instructional.
Informational tooltips describe what a feature is or does, while instructional tooltips are more behavior-oriented, calls to action that might not fully describe what a feature is.
In this piece, we distinguish the subtle difference between the two kinds of tooltips.
Informative Tooltips
These are tooltips that carry essential information that a user needs to know — think of them as an FYI for app users.
Informative tooltips are useful in scenarios where an app wants to drop advice that can benefit the ongoing user experience, or point to a feature that users can use later — here is an example of Youtube highlighting where all the subscribed channels can be accessed.
It is important to note that informative tooltips don’t ask users to take action — they aren’t exactly a call to action, but serve more as a reminder or a heads-up.
The app informs the user about a particular feature or offer, but the CTA is such that the user continues with what he/she was doing.
This is also why informative tooltips come with passive CTA’s like “Got It” or “Ok, Understood”.
And in terms of UX writing, these tooltips never lead with an active verb, as they are not directional. Here is another example from Kindle.
Instructional Tooltips
Instructional tooltips are those that encourage or incentivize users to take a particular action.
A lot of these tooltips lead with a VERB — an action that the user should be performing to achieve a certain task — something as physically distinct like Tap, Swipe, Press, or objective like Select Here, or Try Now.
During the onboarding process, an app usually deploys instructional tooltips to help users to interact and grasp the function of a feature. This is usually done with the aim of creating a habit loop. Here is an example from Vine, the short-form video hosting app from a few years back.
Vine uses an instructional tooltip to help its users discover features — in this example, how to follow accounts and curate content on their home screen.
Its ability to persuade a user to take a certain action makes instructional tooltip a powerful nudge — used not just during onboarding, but also with feature adoption and re-engagement.
From our perspective, we see product teams employ both informative and instructional tooltips in driving the adoption of both new or existing features.
As you’ll see in this infographic piece, these Nudges represent different approaches to behavior change.
While we don’t have any statistics about what’s ultimately more effective in actually changing user behavior, we at Hansel have collected over 300 examples of Feature Adoption Nudges in the wild, including both Informative and Instructional Tooltips.
We released a full infographic to share our key insights from these nudges, along with an eBook of a few visual examples.
Click here to get access to our latest Hansel Insight, our eBook and to download the infographic.
Originally published at https://resources.hansel.io on March 18, 2020.
