Why I stopped being lazy with field descriptions

I have never been so excited to fill in field descriptions.

I have to admit, up until today I have not been the most vigilant in this area. As a System Admin, I thought that I was the only one looking at the field description, which did not help with the motivation to create a solid description.

That was all before Tool Tips came into my life when upgrading to CRM 2013. With the Tool Tips functionality, when my users hover their mouse over a field, the description for that field pops up. I think this is a great opportunity for in the moment, ongoing user training. With this tool my users won’t have to use a quick reference sheet to understand the meaning of a field. All I need to do is be diligent in adding field descriptions.  It may seem small, but I think from a user training and adoption standpoint it is actually a big deal.

It is so simple:

1.) Write a description that is helpful to users trying to understand the field on a record in the description box of the field in the form designer.

2.) Teach your users to look for the tool tip by hovering over the field title.