Retention, Part Nineteen: What Does This Thing Do?

By Sanya Weathers

We’ve talked about the importance of removing obstacles and proper documentation. Combining the two concepts can give a huge boost to your retention, and you need no expensive consultants or rockstar coders to implement them. They’re called tooltips, and they’ve been around for at least fifteen years.

There are two common mistakes that designers make with tooltips, but both are easy to avoid:

–    Too many tooltips that pop up too quickly. If someone so much as glares at an item, a window pops up. No matter where you slide the mouse pointer, a window pops up. This is annoying.

–    Implementing them before anyone tries the product. A designer is usually solving existing problems, and therefore, what he thinks a user will struggle with is informed by the struggles users have with existing products. The new product will have those problems and solutions in mind. The things the users of the new product will choke on are completely new.

The solution to both is the same thing. Add tooltips in response to focus groups and user testing (and first attempt to address the sticking points with better interface design). If one person in your test group gets into trouble, hundreds of other people will have the same problem. If everyone in your test group gets into trouble with something, you’re the problem.

Put a short delay on the tooltip to prevent accidental triggering.

Finally, be sure to take screenshots of each bit of advice or documentation, and upload them all into your wiki or knowledge base. You’ve made sure “disable tooltips” is part of your options menu, so you’ll want the solutions to be available even to people who’ve disabled the point of delivery assistance.