Progressive Reduction

Whether you agree with it or not, this is a really interesting way to approach designing an interface.

We always talk about how digital interfaces give us the ability to change things, to hide pieces until they're absolutely necessary. Print designers have to get used to the fact that not everything needs to be shown at all times when they start designing for screens. This seems like a useful extension of that.

The "Experience Decay" part is also key, and seems very hard to get right. Depending on the feature people will probably need different decay rates.

It's definitely not an easy thing to implement, so I don't think it will be widely implemented, but it will be really interesting to see how it works out for LayerVault. It's not quite a fair test seeing as their users are mostly designers (and people critiquing mockups).

Where it gets even more interesting is if you can hide advanced features like Signposting until the user gets to level 2 in an easier-to-use feature. For an analytics service, Segmentation might be hidden or at least de-emphasized until the user has mastered Filtering or some other, more basic feature.

Anyways, really cool. And will be excited to see where it's taken.