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Tooltips, but only when they earn the interruption

· 4 min read
Arisht Jain
Founder, BreakGround

Tooltips are the most over-deployed and under-edited element in modern product design. Every product has hundreds of them. Most products would be improved by deleting most of them.

The reason tooltips proliferate isn't that they're useful — it's that they're cheap to ship. A tooltip is the answer the team gives when the interface isn't legible enough on its own and the deadline is too close to redesign it.

When a tooltip is doing real work​

A tooltip earns its place on the screen when all three of these are true:

  1. The user is going to need this information at this exact moment. Not "might need at some point" — this moment, before they take the action.
  2. The information cannot be expressed in the visible label. "Save" doesn't need a tooltip. "Save" with the additional information that this also publishes to the public site does — but better still, the button label should be "Publish."
  3. The information is short enough that a tooltip is the right form factor. Two sentences, max. If it's longer, you needed a help article, not a tooltip.

If any one of those is false, the tooltip is decoration. Decoration in a UI is not neutral — it's interruption.

The half-life problem​

Even tooltips that earn their place have a half-life. A user reads the tooltip the first time. The second time they hover, they see it again, and it's wasted attention. The fifth time, it's an actively annoying interruption. By the tenth time, they've trained themselves to hover-with-eyes-averted, which means the tooltip is now active anti-help.

A tooltip with no retirement plan is a bug. The retirement plan can be:

  • Show on first hover only, then not again for that user.
  • Show until the user has performed the related action three times.
  • Show as a one-time popover on first visit to the surface, then never again.

What you should not do is show the tooltip every time. That's the default behavior of every tooltip library, which is why every product has aggregate tooltip fatigue.

The tooltip vs. the inline​

A subtler design question: should this be a tooltip or an inline note? The default is tooltip because tooltips can be added without touching layout. But the inline almost always reads better, because the user doesn't have to hover to see it.

A test: write the tooltip text. Now read the page with the tooltip text inserted as a one-line note next to the relevant element. Is the page worse? In about 20% of cases, yes — the page becomes cluttered. In the other 80%, the page is better — the user gets the information without an interaction, and there's no fatigue problem.

Most tooltips that exist today should be inline notes. The tooltip is a hiding place for content that doesn't deserve to be on the surface, but does deserve to be reachable.

A short editorial pass on your existing tooltips​

If you haven't audited your product's tooltips in the last six months, the audit will pay for itself. Sit down for an hour with a list of every tooltip in the product. For each one, answer:

  • Does the user actually need this at this moment?
  • Could the underlying label or layout do this work instead?
  • Does it have a retirement plan?
  • Is it duplicated by another nearby element?

In my experience, an audit deletes about 40% of the tooltips, rewrites about 30%, promotes about 15% to inline notes, and keeps the remaining 15% as-is. The product gets quieter, faster, and easier to use. None of this requires shipping new code — it's editorial work, applied to the surface that has the most of it.

The teams with the best in-product writing don't have more tooltips. They have fewer tooltips, written better, retired aggressively. The two are correlated.