Onboarding Tooltips That Explain Features In Context

An onboarding tooltip is a short explanation attached to one control in your app, shown when a user hovers over it or clicks it rather than sitting on the page all the time. It answers a question at the point the question comes up, which is what separates it from a tour that runs as a sequence from the beginning.

Tooltips sort into two groups, by trigger and by job. By trigger, one can open when a user hovers the icon, hovers the element itself, or clicks the icon. That choice matters more than it looks, because a dialog shown on hover vanishes as soon as the mouse moves, so anything with a button or a video in it only works on click. By job, a tooltip either explains a control in a line, announces something new where that thing lives, or hands off to a full tour when a line isn't enough.

They're two names for one thing. A hotspot is the beacon that sits on an element, and the tooltip is the dialog it reveals on hover or click. HelpHero calls the feature hotspots and most of the category calls it tooltips, so both words appear on this site for the same feature rather than for two different products.

Put a hotspot on the feature itself, so users find it where they'd actually use it instead of in an email. Give it a short line saying what changed, and a click action that starts a tour if it needs more explaining than that. Add a dismiss button and it stops appearing for any user who has already closed it, which keeps an announcement from following them around after it's old news.

Yes, and it takes one show condition. Hotspots appear every time by default, even for users who have already seen them, so you add a condition to display it only if it hasn't already been opened. A hotspot counts as opened once a user brings up the dialog on hover or click. Dismissals work differently and need no condition at all: a dismissed hotspot never returns.

The same targeting that applies to tours and checklists applies here, so you can show a hotspot on user properties such as role or plan, on events you've sent, on device type, or on a URL match. On top of that there are two conditions only hotspots have, whether it's already been opened and whether it's been dismissed.

Yes, and most of it happens in the style panel rather than in code. You can change the icon size, swap a custom image in for the default beacon, and move where the icon sits against the element it belongs to. Anything past that is custom CSS, which is how you'd get the dark semi-transparent look that a lot of the category uses for tooltips. Setting the icon size to zero hides the beacon altogether, which is what you want when the dialog opens on element hover and a visible dot would only be noise.

HelpHero starts at $55 a month for 1,000 monthly active users, and hotspots are included on every plan along with every other feature, with unlimited seats. Most of the category charges more to get started, and several vendors don't publish their paid tiers at all, quoting them on request after a call.