Content Guidelines

We use tooltips to provide clarity on complex actions/terms, additional information, and educational explanations to further guide the user about any action or aspect of the user flow. 

Note: We do not use tooltips to hide or conceal any type of information that might be critical for the user. 

We follow these basic rules while writing content for tooltips:

• Voice: Be insightful and clear; do not use heavy jargon.

• Tone: Be helpful while giving information or instruction to the user.

• Language: US English

• Voice Structure: Active voice

• Casing: Both title and description in sentence case, and keep proper nouns as is.

• Punctuation: Use no period for short sentences or sentence fragments. Use full punctuation only when the message is a complete sentence. Do not use exclamation (!) and ellipsis (…).

• Words and phrases to avoid: Please, successfully, oops, sorry, uh-oh, something went wrong, you shall, you can, did you know?

Structure of an effective tooltip message

We have 2 variants of the tooltip- normal and with a title.

The normal variant is used to:

• Explain why an action is disabled

• Provide additional information about a field or setting

• Guide the user to take the required actions on the page

• Clarify behavior or conditions without interrupting workflow

Example

Scenario: A button is disabled for the user
Approach: Tell the user what they can do to enable it
Message: Configure at least one VLAN to enable network segmentation

The title variant is used for:

• Onboarding flows

• Product walkthroughs

• Feature introductions

• Scenarios where users need both a label and a supporting explanation

Example

Scenario: When a user is going through a new product feature, say, targeted inventory
Approach: Use the title to say what the tooltip is about and expand on it in the description

Heading: Choose inventory type
Description: Run 'Full Inventory' for a complete check. Use 'Targeted Inventory' to scan specific parts of the cluster faster.