UX sprint group 4 (The long node/add form) progress

http://kreativmango.no/dev/drupal/node-tabs/

As drumm mentioned, we discussed the use of progressive disclosure in Szeged.

Frank Spillers has a very informative article on progressive disclosure (Demystifying Usability: Progressive Disclosure - the best interaction design technique?), and highlights its benefits as well as some of its inevitable dangers. If we are to successfully apply this technique to the node form, we must be aware of the pitfalls, as we'd want to do this right. It's worth noting that he writes about progressive disclosure for the web, where Drupal's forms are more similar to an application.

Still, here are some handy bullet points from his article:

Progressive disclosure is powerful because it embraces several good design principles:

• Advocate for users with different needs (experienced and non-experienced users)
• Limit what you show on a screen
• Give access to the low hanging fruit and de-emphasize infrequent tasks
• Only show users what they need when they need it
• Focus the interface on making the user successful at the start

Benefits of Progressive Disclosure:

• Remove the need for the user to explore and examine the interface first
• Allow the user to chunk the task in a sequence that matches their expectation
• Reduce cognitive overload
• Increase the efficiency and ease of use of the site

Dangers of Progressive Disclosure:

• Users are forced to wait until you are ready to show them
• Repeat use may not require progressive disclosure (depends on the task)
• Over-constraining what users see (or dumbing it down too much)
• Assuming you understand what is the most popular, common or important task

The "danger" points that are the most relevant to us are probably the last two - knowing what to show/hide.

Jakob Nielsen also writes about progressive disclosure in an article where he identifies two things you must get right, the first being:

• You must get the right split between initial and secondary features

The only way to achieve that right split is to use data from usability tests. What are our options for getting some solid data on this?

We might want to focus on this first, before discussing how to actually implement progressive disclosure. Which was Nielsen's second point - "It must be obvious how users progress from the primary to the secondary disclosure levels." See his article for some suggestions on this.

A cool quote I came across: "The elegance of a design could be conceptualized as the complexity of the design problem divided by the complexity of the design solution." Let's aim for an elegant design then :)