Designing for Progressive Disclosure by Steven Hoober
Progressive disclosure interface patterns categorised and evaluated:
- popups,
- drawers,
- mouseover popups (just say no!),
- accordions,
- tabs,
- new pages,
- scrolling,
- scrolling sideways.
I really like the hypertext history invoked in this article.
The piece finishes with a great note on the MacNamara fallacy:
Everyone thinks metrics let us measure results. But, actually, they don’t. They measure only what they are measuring. Engagement, for example, is not something that can be measured, so we use an analogue for it. Time on page. Or clicks.
We often end up measuring what is quick, cheap, and easy to measure. Therefore, few organizations regularly conduct usability testing or customer-satisfaction surveys, but lots use analytics.
Even today, organizations often use clicks as a measure of engagement. So, all too often, they design user interfaces to generate clicks, so the system can measure them.