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How Progressive Disclosure simplifies complexity and reduces clutter?

While designing an interface, you must have felt the dilemma of either providing users with all features in a single screen or progressing through the screens and finding features that suit their needs. For example, multi-selecting list items to know what actions are possible. Another good example is the filter and sort feature of a collection or list view. When it comes down to designing a solution to these problems, designers often make mistakes by assuming and setting the hierarchy of features. Whether to incorporate those function in a single screen or split it into advanced sections is at the heart of interaction design’s problems.

As UX Designers, we must proactively approach this. Putting decision-conscious items about what needs to be visible first and what can be put a click or scroll further away. This hierarchical secondary screen gives an optimal solution and what we call ‘Progressive Disclosure’.

‘Progressive Disclosure’ is at the heart of interaction designers.

What is Progressive Disclosure?

Progressive Disclosure is an interaction pattern that helps users show information as they progress to complete a task. The simple idea behind it is to not overwhelm people while filling out a long form, buying something online, signing up for an event etc., which is important in this era of personalised experience. It helps in managing the complexity of such websites and applications to smaller chunks that people can easily complete without straining their memory or visual cognition.

Why use Progressive Disclosure?

Progressive Disclosure simplifies the experience by simplifying the details for a user until they need or ask for it. Because humans have limited processing capacity for any information, they would get overwhelmed when they are presented with enough features. By hiding such features, you are making your interface less cluttered and error-prone thus enhancing the product easier to learn.

How do you use it?

However simple it may sound, you must design progressive disclosure with the following considerations:

  • Prioritise features: Determine which features the initial disclosure level should contain. It should be kept in mind that the actions possible on initial display tell something is important.
  • Solve for discoverability: While designing a progressive disclosure, discoverability is the persistent challenge. You need to hide things as well as provide enough details to help the users find what they are looking for.
  • Avoid multiple levels of progressive disclosure: Multiple levels of progressive disclosure often result in low usability and users often lose track when they are moving back and forth between the levels.

If your design has many features that would span 3 levels (or more) of disclosure, consider simplifying the design. Put advanced features into groups so that users need to check in one place and ignore such features that they don’t need. You can also put features into multiple secondary displays each of which can be revealed by different control on the initial display.

Progressive Disclosure is the best way to manage complexities and make the interface less error-prone. It would help if you always tried to take the most out of the interface making the designs without confusion. Be aware of the drawbacks of Progressive Disclosure. Design Accordingly!

Let us know your thoughts below.

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