15 Dec 2006 1722H

What is this progressive disclosure?

Progressive disclosure is a fancy interaction design term for chunking complex tasks into easy-to-digest segments. You see it all the time, most likely, but you probably never had a word for it until now. Progressive disclosure is the design principle that lies behind wizards, for instance, or search engines like Google, or print dialog boxes. If you’re a novice user you can get by with basic functionality, but for advanced users you can click on the advanced features tab and customize things to your heart’s content. The right amount of capability for the right user at the right time. It’s a tough balancing act, as Jakob Nielsen says, because users want power, but they also want simplicity. Users often gauge the worth of an application by how many functions the thing has, much like a Swiss Army knife, even if they never ever will use them. Hell, they might not even use the one function they paid for as a “must have”, much like, say, gym memberships as someone said to me today.

For me, the key to designing around progressive disclosure is to understand your personas and what their tasks and goals for your site are. Once we have that knowledge, we can use “mental models” or alignment diagrams and very rough paper prototyping to evolve a design, because, as we all know now, designing in a vacuum is dangerous (you could suffocate, for instance. Just kidding.) Is it possible that we are missing key areas of innovation by doing so? Of course there are. And we’ve gotten by creating innovation in this world for millennia without personas, or diagrams or usability testing, although it’s been very slow going. But for a great many enterprises in the world who have been struggling to figure out this web thing, they’re still trying to get the ground underneath them. Otherwise, I don’t think Forrester would have recommended that companies undertake the design lifecycles to fix the most common user experience problems and only then schedule some meaningful percentage of their time working on innovation.

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