Situation

District and school administrators need a lot of data showing that a program is working if they want to understand how it’s being implemented and keep funding it. They expect educational SaaS platforms to provide that data in an easily accessible format. We created dashboards to display program use data at the district and school level. Each data component was labeled, but it’s difficult to explain in a one- or two-word label what some of the numbers represented in a way that would be clear to most or all users. It’s often necessary to provide a little bit of context or definition so users can understand what a dashboard label means, especially if they’re new to analyzing program data.

Tasks and Actions

Our task was to add short tooltips to the dashboards to provide the context users needed to understand what exactly was represented by the numbers they saw.

I wrote the tooltips with my cross-functional UX writing team. Once we’d put the new tooltips into the comp, the UX designers used it to get feedback from client-facing stakeholders and product managers. Then we rewrote where necessary to include their feedback before sending the comp to user testing.

Examples below are from a comp.

Context and Rationales

The data shows how many users there are at both the district and school levels and how many teachers have “created classes.” Educators must create an instance in the program for each of their classes before they can teach the program. If an educator hasn’t created a class, they’re not active, even if they’ve created an account on the site.

The first “title” line in each tooltip is title case and in most cases is the same as the wording of the label or button the tooltip is explaining. When they’re not the same, we were truncating for space or using different wording to add context. 

Ideally, tooltips should be one sentence or less. We obviously broke that rule at least once.

Users Tooltip 1 (top left—district level) 

This one was difficult! This number of users is districtwide. We needed a short label (Users), but that one word doesn’t explain “number of users across all sites, and if someone is at multiple sites they’re only counted once, and pending users haven’t created an account yet, but they’re still counted in the users number.” This is a perfect example of when a tooltip is necessary. 

Users Tooltip 2 (green smiley—school level) 

This “users” refers to the number of users at each school. (“School” is the word covered by the smiley.) We repeated the explanation of what “pending” means because we didn’t know if they’d read the tooltip above. 

Classes Tooltip 

It was most important with this tooltip to define that “classes” meant number created, and that it included administrator-created classes as well as teacher-created ones.

Users with Classes 

The important callouts in this set of tooltip are “at this site” and “during this school year.” Obviously the numbers would be different if they included multiple sites or ranged over more than one school year.

Reported Sites Tooltips 

This tooltip title obviously doesn’t match the text it’s associated with. In this case we used the tooltip title to give extra context, in part because the associated text was long. Same tip is used below, and it was removed later (this is a comp) because the bottom has site-level information, so it doesn’t belong there. 

Classes Tooltip (district) 

It was most important here to define that “classes” meant number created, that it included administrator-created classes as well as teacher-created ones, and that it was across all sites.

Average Classes Created Tooltip 

This title deviates a little from the page text for brevity. Someone insisted we list a zero minimum if there was at least one site with no classes, but people would immediately assume the schools with no classes would be figured into the average, so we needed to clarify that they wouldn’t be. 

Users with Classes Tooltip 

We needed to make sure everyone understood it included administrators. 

Classes Tooltip (site) 

It was most important to define that “classes” meant number created and that it included administrator-created classes as well as teacher-created ones. This number just reflects classes at this particular site, and we opted not to call that out.

Users Tooltip 

In this tooltip it was important to call out that the number included both pending and active users.

Results

Initial user testing indicated that clients and our client support staff had a much easier time understanding the dashboard labels, but metrics on the efficacy of the tooltips were not available at the time of my departure.