Feature spotlight

One pointer, one thing, once. A feature spotlight is the smallest member of the announcement family: a dot on a menu item, a “New” pill on a control, a short popover anchored to the button that just gained an ability. It is shown where the change is rather than in a modal at the door, so the sentence explaining it arrives in the place where it can actually be tried.

It is often confused with the pattern it is one step of. An onboarding tour is a sequence delivered before anyone asked a question, and the reader’s incentive is to reach the end of it. A spotlight has nothing to reach the end of, which is where its power comes from: a single pointer at the one control that moved does work that five pointers at five controls do not. When the announcement has more than one thing to say, that is a signal it should be a changelog page with a link, not a chain of bubbles over a live screen.

The obligations are short and skipped often. It must be dismissible, and dismissal has to be remembered per person and per feature, because the second showing is what turns a helpful pointer into an obstacle. It must expire on its own: a “New” badge still sitting there six months later has become furniture, and the word stops meaning anything. It must never block the control it points at, which is the classic implementation bug when the announcement brings a scrim with it. And it has to be an interruption worth its cost, which in practice means announcing changes that alter what someone would do, not every shipped ticket.

The pointing device has its own vocabulary. A coach mark is the older name for the annotated overlay, usually a beak or a line drawn from a card to a control, and it carries a whiff of the era when apps opened onto a hand-drawn diagram of their own toolbar. The quieter versions are usually better: an unobtrusive dot that disappears the first time the control is used says the same thing as a bubble and costs the reader nothing to dismiss.