The field help popup allows User Assistance Developers to provide application specific information to administrators and end-users to better instruct them with details and context for a specific page element in a specific UI area. The field help icon appears directly adjacent to the page element it accompanies and launches a small popup window without a heading that contains the help text defined by the UAD and translated by the LANG team as needed.

When to Add Field Level Help

The following usage guidelines apply to field help in the Administrator Pages

Add field help to address a process or business choice. Users go to a page to make good choices for their organization. The clicking and typing exist only as the medium through which they make good choices. Your job is to coach them to the best decisions with opinion, scenarios, and experience.

Sometimes the choice is obvious because UX Designers built a delightful experience with good forcing functions, a clear mission, and so on. But design can’t be everywhere and is often absent from system administrator pages. Your coaching picks up the slack.

You are strongly encouraged to add field level help when:

The choice has far-reaching consequences. For example, it’s far-reaching if it affects every user in a performance review or every course in an LMS. Far-reaching consequences tend to happen in system settings.

It’s hard to see the consequences immediately.
Often, this means that the choice is hard to test:

Easy to test: First name first or last name first, for example, shows up right away.

Hard to test: a business rule that requires specific business data to run the test.

The choice has dire consequences. For example, you can turn off data validation, but you really shouldn’t or you’ll end up with bad data in your system.

You are encouraged to add field level help anywhere you can coach the user and where design investment has been absent. In most cases:

You can coach administrators more than you can coach managers and employees because our customers want to coach their managers and employees.

Managers and employees get the design investment, administrators do not.

Describe Choices not Fields

Avoid describing fields and instead coach the user through their choices.

Testing adding a row

Field

Discusses Field (Avoid)

Discusses Choice (Prefer)

Notes

Hide External Users in Legacy People Search

Enhanced People Search doesn’t adhere to the switch.

Upgrade to Enhanced People Search for finer-grained control over results. If you still use legacy People Search, you can prevent external users from returning in results for a more conservative privacy policy.

The best choice is to upgrade.

If you can’t upgrade, choose to hide external users for a conservative privacy policy.

Keep the Work Permit block in People Profile user-based

When the Work Permit block is user-based, people with multiple employments only see records from their current employment. To see additional records, they have to switch to other employments. Deselect the option to make the block person-based, so they can view records from all their employments.

Most customers clear “Keep the Work Permit block in People Profile user-based.” If you select it, you make additional work for employees with multiple employments: to see their records for each of their multiple employments, they must switch to the other employments, one-by-one.

Last-Visited Page

Personal Start Page

Select this option to redirect users to the last page they visited before the session expired.

Select this option to redirect users to the start page they’ve selected in their personal account settings.

Redirect users to the last visited page when user sessions expire so that users can from where they left off when their session expired. It’s our default setting because we think it works for most customers.

To treat session expiration the same as sign-in, select Personal Start Page.

The Help Portal explains (in short order) why you’d want to choose each one and which is the default.

The job is to move that knowledge closer to the user.

To treat session expiration the same as sign-in, select Personal Start Page. Your users must remember where they were when their session expired to return to the work they were doing when the session expired.

Enable Payment Information Validations

Once enabled, the system performs additional validation checks for payment information. The validation includes the following checks:
- Percentage check: no more than 100% in the Percentage field
- Percentage check: no more than 100% overall calculated within the same Pay Type (for example, two entries for Pay Type Bonus)
- Check for duplicate records with the same values within the same Pay Type
- Check for empty Pay Type (Pay Type is a mandatory field)

You almost never clear Enable Payment Information Validations in productive environments because failure to validate data can corrupt the data in your system. Disable payment validations only in test environments and only to get past an error.

The choice message is: “don’t disable.”

If you want to describe the exact checks, consider a Learn More link.

When in Doubt, Write Field Help

The onus is on you to say why you shouldn’t add field help. Assume you’re going to add it unless you can prove that you shouldn’t.

Don’t assume your audience has been trained in your system or that they remember their training.

Your job is to prompt memory when memory doesn’t exist or fails.

“But you should have gone to training” or “but you should have read the documentation” doesn’t deflect tickets.

What to Write

Describe the business choice that your audience is making, not the field.

Have an opinion – choices are not equal. What’s the right choice?

An opinion on the right choice often depends on customer situation, so write patterns like, “If you are <situation> then you should <choice>.” For example, If you have employees in regions that use alternative calendar formats, enable their calendar format. Otherwise, ignore this setting.

Don't write field help that repeats the field itself: if the field is “Enable US Benefits” don’t write Enables benefits for the United States, or even If you have employees in the United States, enable US Benefits. Better: Customers without employees in the United States can usually ignore this setting.

Writing what a customer can ignore is just as helpful as telling them what they must do.

Style Guidelines

Keep it short, clear, and precise.

Aim for 160 characters of full sentences with periods. More than 200 characters, add a Learn More link.

Use the active voice and imperative mood.

Address the user as "you".

Avoid starting the field help with an article (a, an, the).

Avoid formatting (<b>, <i>, <br>, and so on) and symbols (&, *, and so on).

Learn More Links

A Learn More link is a direct link to content from the application. It is a deterministic, curated experience for the user: we know that most customers struggle here, and we know what information helps, so we’re going to take you to the right place in our content so you can get the help you need. Because it opens the entire help knowledge base, we don’t have to be right 100% of the time. The user can run an AI search quickly if we got it wrong.

NOTE: SAP SuccessFactors Learning currently has its own help solution. The guidelines in this section apply to the Learning solution, even if the technology differs.

When to Add Learn More Links

Add Learn More links to explain processes and concepts on an application page or when you need to say more than you can write with 160 characters in field help.

Examples of when to add Learn More links:

You have a page or a field that requires you to guide readers through a choice to act or not.

The page is “troublesome” and you know how to resolve the trouble: for example, Technical Support tells you it’s generating tickets.

Any other reason why you might want to explain a setting or a page in more depth.

In 2026, SAP SuccessFactors has too few connections between the application and the help our administrators need. We therefore want to add Learn More links. When in doubt, add the links. We’ll revisit in 2030.

What to Link To

In the current design, you can link to only one page. It is one page to one Learn More link.

If you have a page that is a list of settings, and you need to describe the settings, link to a Config List.

If the page is something other than a list of settings or you need to provide links to multiple topic infotypes, link to a landing page.

From the hub topic, you can link to any infotype, but consider these common infotypes:

Orientation Map: If you need to explain a process and how a page fits into it, link to the orientation map you created to define the process.

Shared Understanding (Conceptual or Factual): To explain the concept of the field or the facts around a field or page.

Config List: If you need to list configuration – very useful in a page that’s just a long list of settings.

Troubleshooting: If the page is a tricky one and requires help, especially help from a set of KBAs, consider troubleshooting.