Progressive Disclosure: See It Now

December 17, 2006 on 1:21 pm | In Usability |

The current thinking on good web design revolves around designing a web site that can be easily used by visitors.

One of the important strategies for achieving this is to minimize the number of links on a page. A key method for planning this is to first present the visitor with only links to the major areas of the web site. One of the links can lead to a very large menu for advanced users to utilize.Those areas can contain links to more detailed areas, etc. (this is known as “Progressive Disclosure”).

I’m sure you’ve experienced being overwhelmed by crowded pages, sometimes enough to run away from the page before it bites you. Progressive Disclosure is a great way to prevent this from happening and to encourage visitors to explore your web site with confidence.

Want to see an excellent example of Progressive Disclosure? Just go to the Google home page. Amongst the very few links there, you can see one called ‘more’. If you click on it, you get a second-level menu with only four important links on it: Books, Froogle, Groups and ‘even more’. The first three links are for non-expert users: they link to specific areas of the web site. ‘Even More’ is for the expert users: it leads to a page with 52 links on it (as of this writing).

To delve deeper into Progressive Disclosure, you might want to see Wikipedia’s tract on it, or read what web design philosopoher Jakob Nielsen has to say about it.

And of course, we prefer using Progressive Disclosure on all the web sites we design.  (Message us here to discuss your web site design with us.)

Cheers!

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