Progressive disclosure (Wikipedia)

Short Wikipedia article (effectively a stub) defining progressive disclosure as an interaction design pattern. See Progressive Disclosure.

License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Key points

• The macOS print dialog’s “Show Details” button, expanding a collapsed options panel, as the canonical named example.
• A physical-world analogy from theme park queue design: only a small segment of a waiting line is visible at a time, reducing perceived wait discouragement.
• Frames the pattern as revealing information “when it becomes relevant to the current task” — a task-relevance qualifier alongside the more common “on demand” framing.
• References cited: Jakob Nielsen (Nielsen Norman Group article on progressive disclosure); Donald Norman and Stephen Draper, User Centered System Design: New Perspectives on Human-Computer Interaction (1986, L. Erlbaum Associates) — the edited volume in which Norman’s early design principles appeared, predating The Design of Everyday Things.

Cited In

Patterns

• Progressive Disclosure