Progressive Disclosure

 Progressive Disclosure is used to display a large quantity of information over multiple screens. By doing this you don't expose the user to an overwhelming amount of information at once.

A typical example of this would be an ATM. The user is guided step by step through the process of withdrawing money. You first enter your pin, then select an account and so on. Each screen only exposes the user to one critical function at a time to reduce the complexity of accessing your bank account remotely.

There are a number of functions that can be performed by an ATM, withdrawing, transferring and depositing money. Progressive disclosure only lets the user pick one action at a time and then drills down into the more detailed user tasks.

For my DSR project I created a Social Currency Calculator. The purpose of this was to get the user to enter in particular information regarding their Physical and Social activity over a period of time, and use the responses to calculate how much social capital they generate over the course of the year.

  The calculator helped the user through a Linear path of questions. Each question was restricted to one main information collecting screen. This reduced the complexity of the survey for the user.

While filling out the survey progressive disclosure helped focus the user attention on one specific task, rather than being distracted by the other questions that were to be asked.

In retrospect, if I had to redo this application I would have a "more information' link on the individual questions so the user could investigate the reasons behind the survey. An example for Question 1 on the left would be to give the user more information on where or how they could get a membership number in order to complete the form.
If they needed this information it would be a click away, if not it would not clutter the design and overwhelm the user.