Pop-ups Best Practices

Use Pop-ups to display important messages about your product or feature. For example, inform users about upcoming downtime by scheduling a Pop-up. For more information on scheduling Pop-ups, see Schedule a Pop-up.

Create a new Pop-up using one of Whatfix's available templates, eliminating the need to start from scratch. Whatfix enables you to choose from 6 templates. For more information, see Create a Pop-up.

For the Pop-up to appear on your application, ensure that the Pop-up start date, end date, start time, and end time are set correctly. For more information, see Schedule a Pop-up.

Whatfix recommends you to use Pop-ups to provide a guided product or feature tour to users. Include embedded videos to onboard users, introduce your software application using a quick tour, or deliver change management communication.

Whatfix recommends that you use the last steps of your Pop-ups, to introduce users to your other Whatfix widgets like Self Help and Task List.

If you want to create a Pop-up for your English and German-speaking users, Whatfix recommends that you translate the Pop-ups in the UI so that the Pop-up content is both in English and German respectively. Route your users to the respective language support page.

For more information, see Translate Pop-ups in multiple languages.

Once you are done creating a Pop-up, test the Pop-up using the Preview mode. Whatfix also recommends that you check the Pop-up once it's live to ensure that it's appearing as expected to your end users.

After a Pop-up serves its purpose, move the widget back to Draft. Keeping inactive content in Production can cause performance issues on the Dashboard, as Whatfix continues to evaluate it, even if it does not display to the end user. Thus, it's best to keep only relevant widgets active for smoother performance.

• Add Alternative Text to images within Pop-ups.

• Avoid adding interactive elements such as links, videos, or buttons in the middle of the Pop-up content. Position the links at the end of the paragraph or create a separate call-to-action (CTA) for user interaction.
• Upload videos to Whatfix before you add them to Pop-ups; Videos hosted on Whatfix align with the accessibility behavior of browsers that end users are more familiar with.
• Ensure that you provide context of the video or audio content when adding them to Whatfix Pop-ups.

• Add closed captions to videos; ensure that both video and audio transcripts are easily accessible for all end users.
• Ensure you use WCAG compliant color contrast themes.
• Check the tabbing order for Whatfix Pop-ups. The logical tabbing order on Whatfix Pop-ups should be from top to bottom and then left to right, in a Z pattern. However, interactive elements on a Pop-up always receive the initial focus; otherwise the leftmost button receives the initial focus when multiple buttons are present. To understand what tabbing order is, refer to Tab order explained.