Overview
Hotspots
Hotspots are static onboarding elements that can exhibit near-at-hand information about any item in your product.
You can think of a hotspot as an asynchronous box presenting informative content on demand.
Hotspots do not block user interaction; thus, they do not sacrifice the sense of discovery.
Example Use-case
For example, you can attract attention to specific elements with a series of pulsing hotspots to acclimatize new users with your UI.
They can be definitive, explanatory, or even humorous and utilized to subtly remove the guesswork from any user experience.
Guides
On the other hand, guides are dynamic onboarding flows that play interactive parts in the user experience. They educate users on the go, serving users the resources they need to resolve their questions.
Compared to the asynchronous hotspots, guides are in motion. In other words, the user should finish or drop this flow once a guide is started.
Example Use-case
With Guides, you can create product tours and show users the most important features. In this use case, the primary purpose can be defined as making users understand the lay of the land.
You can also guide people concurrently with the help of successive, action-driven steps for them to achieve a specific goal.
With Hotspots and Guides, you can support end-users at the right time and cushion their eventual frustration considerably.