Tooltips are user-triggered interface elements that provide contextual information about specific features or concepts in your product.
Being a dynamic user experience—a component that shows and hides interactively—it is meant to be a subtle UI hint that, upon interaction, will provide your users with extra information relevant to them at a given moment.
Availability & Usage
🔐 Unlimited Tooltips for all plans
⚙️ Different Triggers available in the Builder
The great thing about Tooltips is that they fit a very wide range of use cases. Being a short-lived and contextual form of annotation that the user triggers, it will always be successful in capturing users' attention by highlighting specific features of your product.
The best part? Since your users trigger your Tooltips, you already have the first sign that they want to know more. Therefore, Tooltips can be instrumental in highlighting particular features and providing in-depth explanations without crowding your UI and overwhelming your users.
Here are a few specific use cases where you can use Tooltips:
Onboarding new users
Driving feature adoption
Explaining taxonomy or specific concepts
Providing contextual advice and help
By now, Tooltips might seem like the ultimate tool for feature highlighting and in-flow explanations. However, when Tooltips are poorly conceived, they can become overwhelming, distracting, and even annoying.
Pulkit, our co-founder, has put together a helpful video showcasing some of the best practices surrounding Tooltips (with great live examples) and what to avoid when creating them -- find it below!
In the video, Pulkit highlights five essential rules for creating great Tooltips:
Consider each Tooltip as product friction
Explain only non-obvious things
Make it contextual to user actions
Use only one at a time and no more than three or four in a row
Analyze, test and iterate
Make sure to give it a watch before deploying your Tooltips 🙂
👉 Check out this demo to explore configuring a Tooltip:
There are just a couple of steps to create a Tooltip and get it published in your app, with Chameleon.
Pick Tooltips from the Dashboard's left-side menu, and hit 'Create a Tooltip'
Next, enter your app's URL to enter the Builder and build it, to ensure it is contextual and useful to the last detail. The styling will be the same as your global account styling, but you can adjust that in the Builder. 😉
The Builder will open on your website and you will be prompted to select an element on the page to anchor your Tooltip to.
Once you select an element, you can adjust the Pointer so the feature you want to highlight is not obstructed and is comfortably accompanied by your Tooltip. You can choose to anchor to the center of:
The selected on-page element
The Canvas body of your Tooltip.
You can also remove the Pointer altogether if you're targeting, for example, larger content blocks and want to use the Tooltip as a guiding header in case of more complex features.
💡 What defines a Tooltip? Contextual positioning and subtle display. You can also use Tours to create Tooltips, by adjusting its Step position, adding a Pointer, and the right trigger for it.
Use the Builder options to create an on-brand Tooltip. Add your copy and adjust its look and behavior to fit your brand and users' needs.
In the Builder, you can:
Set its exact on-page position, and how it should appear
Customize its background (including adding a gradient or an image)
Adjust and further format the text
Configure the buttons style, and text, and connect users to other Experiences with Additional Actions
Set an entry animation
Set a URL rule if you need to tweak the page on which this Tooltip will display.
💡 You can configure your Tooltip to show on a different page by adjusting the URL matching criteria as you would for any other Chameleon Experience.
Make sure to define how you want your Tooltip to be triggered -- you can do so from the Display Rules section of the Builder.
Here, you can choose from triggers similar to those available for Tours, namely:
None
Page element click
Page element hover
Icon click
Icon hover
When you're satisfied with the way your Tooltip performs, go ahead and preview it from the Builder. Iterate based on your impressions until you're happy with the result.
Great news -- your Tooltip is ready to be published! 🎉
Switch back to the Dashboard, and your Tooltip styling will be saved and ready to go live.
Go ahead and pick the Environments your Tooltip should display in, select your audience Segment, and finally publish your Experience! 🚀
🤝 Make sure to always test your Tooltips live to ensure they're displaying correctly and are performant. Share it with colleagues to get their impressions, also!
Anytime you want to update a live Tooltip, all you have to do is find it in your Dashboard. Go to the 'Edit Tooltip' tab, and you'll be able to adjust it as usual. Don't forget to apply your changes so users can see them, too 😉.
Say you wanted to add a Tooltip that displays a link to your Intercom messenger any time someone hovers on a "Contact Support" button that is natively built into your app.
First, set the Position of your Tooltip based on any one of these elements. Then, click "Adjust element" and remove or edit the identifiers under "Specify your element further:" until they are general enough so they match all the elements on the page.
In this example for "Contact Support", you might remove all identifiers other than " Text contains 'Contact Support' " and " Type is 'button' " because that should always match where you want the Tooltips to appear.
ℹ️ This can only be done for 'hovering' or 'clicking' on an element and does not apply when using icons.
Here's another example demonstrating how this can be done:
Note: This video does not show the latest version of our product. We will soon update all our videos to fit our new style and improvements. 😊