What is a hotspot?
A hotspot is a small pulsing beacon anchored to an interface element that opens a short explanation card when clicked. Unlike a tooltip, it doesn't interrupt — it sits quietly in peripheral vision, visible to the curious and ignorable by everyone else, which makes it the politest instrument in feature discovery.
Why the passivity is the point
A hotspot inverts the usual guidance contract: instead of the product deciding you'll hear about a feature now, the user decides whether and when to investigate. That opt-in quality is why hotspots carry almost no annoyance cost — the users who click were curious; the ones who don't were never interrupted. For feature discovery among likely-but-not-certain audiences, that trade is ideal.
Using them well
- One at a time. Five simultaneous beacons cancel each other into noise. Spend the attention on the one feature that matters this quarter.
- Target the plausible audience. A beacon on an advanced feature belongs on the screens of users whose behavior predicts needing it, via segmentation — not on every account forever.
- Cap the exposure. Shown once, dismissible forever. A hotspot that pulses for weeks becomes furniture, and furniture teaches nothing.
Hotspot vs. tooltip
Same anchor, different initiative: a tooltip opens itself at a moment you control; a hotspot waits. Reach for tooltips inside tours and guided moments, hotspots for ambient "there's something here worth knowing" signals. Modern tools ship both from the same no-code builder, with the click-through measurable per beacon — so a hotspot nobody opens is a finding, not a mystery: wrong element, wrong audience, or a feature whose name needs work.
See the concepts running live.
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