Part Three: The details · Screens
Showing every option at once overwhelms a beginner. Hiding them frustrates someone who knows what they want.
Two people open the same export dialog. One wants a spreadsheet of this month's orders and has never exported anything. The other does it weekly and needs a particular date range, a different delimiter and only four columns.
Show both of them everything, and the first person faces fifteen controls before they can press Export. They do not know which ones matter, so they read all of them and worry about the ones they do not understand. Hide everything behind menus, and the second person has to dig every week for the same three settings.
Teams tend to settle this by whoever spoke last. A long-standing customer complains, and an option is promoted to the main screen. Enough of those and the screen is a control panel again. Then someone simplifies it, and the complaints begin from the other side.
Both people can be served at once, because their needs come in an order. Nearly everyone needs the common case. A few need more, and they know they do. So the screen shows the common case, complete, with sensible values already filled in. One plainly labeled control opens the rest. The print dialog on a Mac has long worked this way: printer, copies and pages, and a Show Details button for paper handling, scaling and the rest.
The short version has to be enough to finish with, and the door to the rest has to say what is behind it. "Advanced" tells people little. "Date range, columns and format" tells them whether to open it.
From
To
Format
Delimiter
Columns
Export
Therefore:
Show what most people need to finish the task, already set to sensible values. Put the rest behind one control whose label says what it contains, and let people who always need more keep it open.
In practice. Pick your most crowded dialog. Mark the controls that most people leave untouched. Move those behind a single link, and name the link after what is in there.
Goes with. The values shown first are GOOD DEFAULTS (36). Remembering that someone keeps the panel open is THE PRODUCT REMEMBERS YOU (45). When the choices depend on one another, the stepped form of this is ONE DECISION AT A TIME (75).