Effective data validation is essential for any type of form on your website. Be it a simple contact form or a complex medical history form. Multiple ways are used in which data validation can be done. Adding informative tooltips is one of the ways to enhance data collection by providing real-time guidance and clarification.

How Tooltips Help in Data Validation

Tooltips provide detailed guidance and assist the user in filling the form fields with correct data. Here are how tooltips contribute to data validation.

• Clarifying Field Requirements: Inside the tooltip, you can elaborate on the requirements of the fields. Like if you want a user to enter data in a specific format or you want them to do a calculator and add the result of it in the field.
• Preventing Common Errors: You can not only provide examples of valid data inside tooltips but highlight some of the common errors and also help in preventing incorrect data entry. 
• Enhancing User Confidence: Users will feel confident about the data they have entered and will be at peace since they know that they have correctly submitted the required information.

Implementing Tooltips for Data Validation in WPForms

Implementing tooltips for data validation in WPForms is easy with the help of Tooltips for WPForms. This will allow you to add clear text, image, or video instructions for each field without any coding. Here is how you set it up:

• Install and activate Tooltips for WPForms.
• Navigate to WPForms -> Ultimate Kit from your website’s backend.
• Now, click on the Tooltips panel and then add your tooltip instructions for each field.
• Adjust the design elements of tooltips and their container to match your website design.
• Don’t forget to check the ‘Enable Tooltips’ option.
• Save your changes, and that’s it.

Use Case of Tooltips in Data Validation

Let’s assume you have a multi-line input field in your form labeled “Investment Portfolio Allocation”. In this field, you want the users to enter the percentage distribution of their investments across different classes like real estate, stocks, Fixed deposits, etc. Since you have the tooltips, you can explain via text, images, or video in detail and demystify the field for the user.

The likelihood of users entering wrong data decreases drastically by adding a clear, concise tooltip.

Additional Data Validation Techniques

By using multiple data validation techniques in conjunction with each other, you can improve the quality of submitted data. Along with tooltips, you can use these additional validation techniques in WPForms:

• Placeholders: If you have a specific format in which you want the data to be filled, as the data should be in mm/dd/yyyy format, then you can use it as a placeholder, providing clear visual instructions.
• Validation Messages: Clear validation messages help users fix any issues with the data in the field. If a user enters a wrongly formatted URL in the website field, then they can be alerted using the validation message.

Conclusion

Incorporating tooltips as a data validation method in WPForms is an effective way to maintain the quality of submitted data. It is relatively easy to add tooltips with the Tooltips for WPForms addon. The form looks visually appealing as well as interactive after the addition of tooltips.