Show people only what they need right now. Keep the rest out of sight until they ask for it. Less clutter, faster decisions, less confusion.
Imagine walking into a restaurant and instead of a menu, the chef lists every single ingredient in the kitchen. Technically it’s all the information you need — but it’s useless. What you actually want is: what can I order tonight?
That’s what bad UI design does. It shows everything at once — every option, every setting, every field — and leaves the user to figure out what’s relevant to them. Progressive disclosure is the opposite approach: show the essentials first. Let people ask for more when they need it.
The idea was formalised by software designer JF Nance in the 1980s, but it’s really just common sense. People don’t want to know everything upfront. They want to get started, and discover more as they go.
“Don’t show people everything at once. Show them what they need to get started. Let them ask for the rest.”
— JF Nance, IBM, 1987
Below are two versions of an email campaign form. Same features, same fields. The bad version shows everything at once. The good version shows the three fields most people need, with the rest behind a single “Advanced options” link.
The good version doesn’t remove any features. Every option from the bad version is still there — it’s just not in the way. A new user can send their first campaign in seconds. A power user who needs UTM tracking or a custom reply-to address will find it exactly where they’d expect it.
This is the key insight: progressive disclosure is not about making things simpler for everyone. It’s about making things easier for most people, without making them harder for anyone.
When you search for a hotel on Booking.com, you pick how many adults, children, and rooms you need. Simple. But if you add a child, something new appears: a dropdown asking for the child’s age. Booking.com needs this to calculate the right price. But it would be annoying — and confusing — to ask everyone for a child’s age. So they don’t. They only ask when it’s actually relevant.
Try it below. Start with 0 children. Then click + to add a child and watch what happens.
This is progressive disclosure at its simplest. Booking.com knows that most searches don’t involve children. So it doesn’t ask everyone for a child’s age. The moment you say “I have a child” — and only then — the relevant question appears. The form adapts to your situation instead of dumping everything on you at once.
Progressive disclosure works anywhere people have different levels of need. Here are the most common places you’ll find it in products:
Nance, J. F. (1987). Progressive disclosure. CHI ’87: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems. · Nielsen, J. (2006). Progressive disclosure. Nielsen Norman Group.