Why Tooltips are Terrible and How to Better Design Them

Tooltips are short messages related to specific UI elements that provide additional explanations and guide users towards taking specific actions. They're triggered when a user hovers over an on-page item or when they click on an icon, a hotspot, or another active element. Effective tooltip design can have a big influence on whether users understand the features and achieve success with your product. A good tooltip is interesting, relevant, valuable, and helpful. To create effective tooltips, consider each tooltip as friction, explain only things that are not discernible from the interface design, make tooltips as contextual as possible, show one tooltip at a time, and test your tooltips.