Are information tooltips useless?

While creating a new feature, one of the important parts will be the tutorial (as known as the First Time User Experience).

The tutorial is a helpful way to teach the players about the mechanics of the basics of the feature and show the player how they should interact with it.

Some times, when we build an intricate feature, we will want to add more easy to access information about the feature.

There are 3 main ways games show extra details about features for users:

1. ? Information button - Will open an information popup with explanations about the feature
2. ?? Extra text - As it sounds, a small reminder usually with call to action
3. ?? Tooltips - Usually containing extra information or details (like prizes in a chest)

Using them effectively can help new players, returning players or any other player playing the game understand what they need to do and how to do it.

But like any other thing, more is not always better!

Side note - here I didn't find a place where more was worse but there are problems with it that we will see later        

When can we have useless information?

In this example we have tooltips that are just explaining things about Coins and Toolboxes and Gems, how does this relate to battle pass? What new information or call to action does it give the player?

In my opinion, those tooltips give nothing to the player and therefore redundant, that game would be the same without them.

How I didn't have to look long for bad tooltips/info text?

Quite simply, there is a specific type of features to look for - Progression the player have no control on.

?? For example - Battle Passes and Daily Missions Passes (collect x mission to win)

?? Let's take a look at 2 examples:

We can see in the first example we have text with the information that we need to some daily mission in order to be able to claim the missions counter and in the second example there is no such information displayed on the screen.

Even if the player will not understand what is that things the first time they open the feature, after completing the first missions they will see the progress of the counter going up, and when they will complete the counter they will see the claim button and will get the rewards.

After few times anyone will understand the correlation between completing mission and getting the prizes in the counter!

The player have no direct control on the counters!

The player do have direct on completing the mission and the counters are used to give more incentive to completing all of them. While the players are playing they are completing mission, not counters, counter are a side effect for the missions being completed.

?? One last short example before we learn they is so bad

What would you remove here and why?

First of all - EVERYTHIGN! Believe me when I say, no one is clicking on those tooltips, I only found them they I searched if there are any tooltips there.

Putting that aside, I would remove the 'Get x more Activity to claim' text - we can see on the screen how much xp we have and how much we need to get to this prize, this text is giving us no new information at all, just something we already knew.

Also, the tooltips for the collected prizes, the and the 'collected' text - we already got this, I don't care what prized I collected ??♂? (and I think the chests image as an open can tell us we already collected them...)

?? If it's not bad for the player then for whom?

1. The designer of the game's UI - like we saw of the examples of '2 missions counters with text', this extra information takes up a lot of space that can be better utilizes for a better UI and for other elements.
2. The development team - each new thing we add to the scope of the feature, like tooltips, adds time and complications for the people working on the project. With them new edge cases and bugs may appear that can influence the player's experience.

Those problems are not big, I think it took me more effort write this article then that.

But, I believe that wasting time and effort on things that are not only irrelevant but no one is going to use. And yes, I checked it with analytics, there are basically no players using those tooltips.

?? Players not clicking on the tooltips are another problem- follow this newsletter and next time we will check how to make players know they can see the tooltips?