Fire hints from behavior, not from a clock

What it is

When a hint appears should bind to a step the person just did or just failed, not to days since install, Wednesday, or a release date. Behavior puts the sentence on the current goal; a clock only guarantees calendar exposure, not usefulness now. This entry is the trigger rule. It is not the progressive syllabus of “introduce a feature at first relevance,” and not the collapse of the whole hint class past a dose threshold. Timed “what’s new” bars and seasonal promo tips belong in the set this rule restrains.

Why it happens

Time is a convenient clock on the product side: teach export on day three, shout a new feature on ship day. The person’s task clock does not line up—day three may be a meeting; ship day may be a deadline unrelated to the feature. Misaligned, the hint is an irrelevant interruption: reading cost is paid, encoding has nothing to attach to. Behavior triggers on “selected an exportable set then downloaded instead,” “paged the same list by hand twice,” so the sentence explains the step that currently hurts. Clock triggers also fake fairness: everyone gets the same day, so nobody seems especially bothered, while bother is sprinkled on irrelevant moments and habituation of the channel speeds up. Behavior triggers will hit active users more, so they still sit under a dose cap; they at least spend each speaking slot in a situation that has a cue, and the same dose buys more effective reading.

Where it stops holding

Calendar facts that are not about behavior (remind before a bill, a certificate expiry) are not teaching hints; they belong on notification or account channels, not in feature tips. Cold start with no observable behavior (nothing clicked yet) cannot be behavior-triggered; fall back to empty state or entry visibility, not a “day-zero hint pack.” An overly broad behavior (visited a page) decays into a fake clock: a habitual page is “relevant” every day. Offline or batch tools have sparse interaction; “next open while that object still exists” can be the trigger, still not a wall-clock date.

Applying it

• Write a trigger behavior for every automatic hint (selected a kind of object, an action failed, a substitute path repeated). Delete teaching bars that fire only on install-day or ship-day.
• After the trigger, still check for an interruptible seam (a subtask boundary); do not insert mid-input.
• Visiting a page is not a trigger; require a pause, a failure, or an object selection on that page.
• Verify by replaying sessions where a hint actually fired and asking what the person was doing and whether the sentence explained that moment. “It was Wednesday” or “we just shipped” means the trigger is wrong.

Related

• Within the group: H2.07.1 Past a threshold, hints are ignored as a class · H2.07.3 Stop hinting features the user already uses
• Adjacent: H2.03 Progressive onboarding · H5.02 Interruption cost and timing · H4.01 Timing of requests
• Search terms: behavior-triggered hint · calendar tip · contextual coaching