progressive-disclosure

Use this skill whenever a design has *more* available than the user needs to see at this moment — settings panels with advanced options, forms with optional fields, dashboards with drill-down detail, navigation with deep IA, dialogs with "More options" affordances, marketing pages with FAQ accordions. Trigger when designing or fixing surfaces that feel "overwhelming," when stakeholders argue about whether to expose every option up front, when novice and expert users have different tolerance for the same surface, or when reviewing a UI cluttered with rarely-used controls. Progressive disclosure is one of the foundational principles in ''Universal Principles of Design'' (Lidwell, Holden, Butler 2003), originally formalized through the Xerox Star user-interface work in the 1970s.