ADR-0076: In-context concept help is an information icon in a hover tooltip

Inline help for an ambiguous label is a small information (i) icon wrapped in a hover tooltip carrying a short explanation - the platform's one established affordance, reused rather than reinvented.

Status

Accepted. Reconstructed from the codebase on 2026-06-13; the pattern is live today and is reused by the 0.28.0 Activity-feed clarity work (odd-platform#1657).

Context

Some controls expose a concept whose meaning is not obvious from a label alone. The clearest 0.28.0 case is the Activity feed, where Owner means the owner of the affected asset, Made by (owner) means the current owner associated with whoever made a change, and Made by (user) means that person's immutable external username — three ideas a one-word label cannot disambiguate. The platform already solved this class of problem in several places and needs one consistent affordance for it, not a parallel invention each time.

Decision

In-context concept help is a small information (i) icon wrapped in a hover tooltip carrying a short explanation. Concretely it is the platform's existing InformationIcon rendered inside an AppTooltip:

<AppTooltip title={explanation} checkForOverflow={false}>
  <InformationIcon width={14} height={14} />
</AppTooltip>

This is the affordance already used by, among others:

• the Data Entity overview About block (InternalDescriptionHeader),

• Term definitions (TermDefinition),

• the Data Quality SLA report (OverviewDQSLAReport),

• the data-entity details preview (DataEntityDetailsPreview).

New surfaces that need inline concept help reuse this pattern — the same AppTooltip + InformationIcon, with the help text supplied through the i18n catalogue — rather than introducing a different control (a click popover, a bespoke tooltip, or a longer label). The 0.28.0 Activity-feed filters (Owner / Made by (owner) / Made by (user)) are the newest adopters.

Consequences

• One consistent, recognisable "(i) tells me more" interaction across the product; users learn it once.

• No new component or dependency — the icon, the tooltip, and i18n already ship; adopters compose them.

• The affordance is hover-based and suited to a short explanation (a sentence or two). It is not for interactive content (multi-step flows, in-tooltip links); a control needing that is a different decision, out of scope here.

• This ADR is descriptive — it standardises the existing pattern and directs reuse; it does not mandate retrofitting every terse label at once.