UX Articles

“What’s this?” Link & Tooltip

Jamie Holst

Co-Founder

Published Nov 9, 2010

I just stumbled upon this interesting spin on the good old “What’s this?” help link.

In Wildbit’s Postmark app you’re greeted with a tooltip the moment you hover the “What’s this?” link. You can click to see the full help article.

Instead of forcing the customer to open a new page to get help, a small tooltip is showed immediately when the “What’s this?” link is hovered. Just a single sentence of help text, briefly hinting at what the features does.

Those in need of more help can still click the link to get the full article – the tooltip explicitly tell you “Click to learn more”. This is a crucial detail since your customers might otherwise think that the tooltip was the only help available.

Instantly displaying a small tooltip before sending people off to a new page seems like a great way to help those customers who only need a few pointers (the tooltip), while still catering to those who need all the help you can offer (the full help article).

Jamie Holst

Co-Founder

Published Nov 9, 2010

Jamie is co-founder of Baymard and CTO. Jamie oversees all of Baymard's technical development and writes articles on general UX topics and on the intersection between technology & UX , like compatability features, UI bugs, search logic, and how it impacts the end user exerience.

If you have any comments on this article you can leave them on LinkedIn

Share:

User Experience Research, Delivered Weekly

Join 60,000+ UX professionals and get a new UX article every week.

A screenshot of the UX article newsletter