Our working memory can only hold about 4–7 pieces of information at a time before performance drops.

“Progressive disclosure is a design pattern that gradually reveals information depending on the user’s need.”

Benefits of progressive disclosure

For many reasons, progressive disclosure is a great design process to implement in your product user interfaces.

Here are some of them:

• Improve the customer experience for novice users — Learning a new product can be overwhelming, especially if there are a number of core features that users can use. Progressive disclosure can help slow down this learning and ultimately improve the first-time experience with new users.
• Cleaner user interface — Progressive disclosure follows simple principles suggested by interaction designers to adopt cleaner interfaces that only reveal the information a user needs.
• A better understanding of core and secondary features — Progressive disclosure can help to isolate your primary or secondary features.
• Reduce the learning curve — Teaching your user how to use your product through small steps using progressive disclosure can help reduce the learning curve.
• Less error prone — It will also help them be less error prone because of their increased knowledge of your product.

Use Cases

1. Product Descriptions & Reviews:

Imagine a user, Sarah, looking for wireless earbuds on Amazon. She clicks on a promising option, but instead of quickly understanding if it’s right for her, she encounters:

• A huge block of technical details right away.
• Hundreds of mixed reviews that take too long to sort through.
• Important information, like compatibility or return policies, buried deep in the page.

In fact, I feel there is already too much information even before show more button😝, personally that much information burdens me.

Pain Points Solved