10 tips to get the most out of inline help

An exciting feature in VisualSP is the ability to place inline help (also known as tool tips) right where your user is likely to need help. Here are 10 tips to get the most out of inline help.

1. Use inline help to highlight design conventions. Draw attention to the feature and educate users on what it means.
2. Inline help is specific, contextual, and timely, appearing when a user is most likely to interact with a new feature.
3. Always focus your product tours and in-app messages around user goals, not features themselves.
4. Inline help can be used to draw user attention to a new or hidden feature at the relevant time in their journey or workflow. Inline help is especially useful for pointing out easy-to-miss changes, delivering value quickly, and then getting out of the way.
5. Part of what makes inline help so powerful is that they are contextual and specific--they appear within the product itself and are attached to individual features, allowing you to coach users through the feature discovery process.
6. Inline help is transient and highly contextual. Inline help is not good for mission-critical information or anything that a user needs to refer back to frequently.
7. Don't place inline help on images, videos, or other content that users have to interact with.
8.  Don't use inline help for an action that the user performs regularly.
9. Keep the text short - fewer than 150 characters and no more than two lines of body text make for easier reading.
10. Watch out for redundancy. If a feature is already explained by the copy, inline help  may be unnecessary and end up frustrating users.