What is Progressive Disclosure?

Progressive disclosure is a design principle that aims to enhance user experience by revealing information gradually, based on user interactions and needs. By presenting only essential information upfront and progressively revealing more advanced or detailed options as users delve deeper into a system or interface, progressive disclosure reduces cognitive overload and helps users navigate complex environments more effectively. In this article, we’ll delve into the concept of progressive disclosure, its benefits, and how it’s applied in various domains to improve usability and user satisfaction.

What is Progressive Disclosure?

What is Progressive Disclosure?

Progressive disclosure is a feature in design for showing limited information or only a few available options among many and hiding the rest under a menu, an accordion, a tab, or on a different page altogether. The visible options are the most relevant ones to the majority of the audience and as the users move on to a task or become more familiar with the interface, they can access other features or information by performing an additional action, this action could be clicking a button, opening a menu, expanding an accordion, etc.

An example of progressive disclosure is the “Replace” dialogue in Microsoft Word. When the user is trying to replace a phrase in a document with another, they see a simple form with two fields: find and replace. For most tasks, this dialogue will be enough. However, some users occasionally may have more sophisticated needs. For example, they may want to replace whole words only. In that case, they could click the “More” button for additional options.

How to create Progressive Disclosure?

Step 1: User Research

User Research is the first step and the key component of designing, planning for Progressive Disclosure starts from here. It is important for Progressive Disclosure component to show the relevant and important information at first and for that we need to understand what’s most important for the user. Take detailed notes of the user research, analyze the information, understand the trend, and organize data for multiple components (menu, accordion, tab, multiple pages etc.) for Progressive Disclosure.

Step 2: Reduce information/features

Next step is to ensure that we show the visitors exactly what they need and show additional information to them only when they need it. For that divide the design into features (menu, accordion, tab, multiple pages etc.) with prioritizing the key and relevant information.

Step 3: Follow the “more clicks” formula

This means we divide the application or website into multiple segments where more information is disclosed when the visitors click. The mantra for Progressive Disclosure is – more clicks, less thinking, faster satisfaction.

Step 4: Iterate

Progressive Disclosure is complex to achieve and we need to take care of a lot of features depending on what we are building, you won’t reach to a really good design just in the first go so take feedback from users and Iterate and repeat this step until you have professional appearing Progressive Disclosure components for your design.

Importance of Progressive Disclosure

Importance of Progressive Disclosure can be understood in following points:

1. Commanding the user’s focus

Progressive Disclosure approach for a design focuses the user on the current step, this is particularly helpful when the process is very complex, and seeing all the details together would be overwhelming.

2. Creating a User flow

Using progressive disclosure in multi-step tasks has an important advantage, If the flow has many branches that depend on user input, users will only have to see those which are relevant to their situation. For example, if you had to enter payment information and wanted to pay using Payment method A, it would be unnecessary to see fields associated with Payment method B.

3. Progressive Disclosure for content

Progressive disclosure applies to content too, not just commands. You can use it for content by only providing general product information in a single page and then detailed specifications can be accessed by expanding an accordion, or visiting a secondary page.

4. Reducing the cognitive load

Progressive Disclosure ensures that as soon as the user enter your application or website, he/she is not bombarded with a ton of information. This reduces the cognitive load in the mind of the user leading to better user experience.

Best Practices for Progressive Disclosure

1. Consistency

Make sure to have a consistency around the entire Progressive Disclosure component. This helps the user to know the boundaries of when the Progressive Disclosure ends.

2. Golden rule of Progressive Disclosure

The golden rule to enable Progressive Disclosure in your design is to follow these three steps – have more steps, give more control and have more separation in information.

3. Don’t overcomplicate

Oftentimes we over complicate the component by either adding too much or too little information and visuals. Don’t try to overcomplicate the process of designing for Progressive Disclosure, focus on one thing – user centricity.

4. Don’t over saturate options

Over saturation of options can increase the complexity of your design making people disoriented and confused. Make sure to have limited and useful options only.

Conclusion

Progressive disclosure is a feature in design for showing limited information or only a few available options among many and hiding the rest under a menu, an accordion, tab, or on a different page altogether. The typical application of Progressive Disclosure is to show only information that is relevant for the current step of a task. The importance of Progressive Disclosure can be understood by the fact that it can help you reduce the cognitive load in the mind of your user which leads to a better user experience. Make sure to follow the points we discussed in the article in order to design professional looking Progressive Disclosure components for your application or website.