Progressive disclosure: Upwork case study

Welcome to the UX Rundown. In this series, we share quick, actionable UX breakdowns of real apps and websites – spot what works, what doesn’t, and learn how to apply it to your own designs.

Discover just how impactful it is to show the right information at the right time. This UX case study breaks down progressive disclosure and how to reduce cognitive load like Upwork does, helping users make confident decisions without feeling overwhelmed.

What you'll learn in this UX tutorial:

• What progressive disclosure is and why it matters

• How to identify the right information to show users at the right time

• Real examples from Upwork's freelancer cards, Airbnb's listings, and Duolingo's onboarding

• How to run quick design surveys and preference tests to validate your designs

• A complete before/after case study showing measurable improvement in user confidence

Whether you're designing card views, onboarding flows, or any browsing experience, this principle will help you create interfaces that feel intuitive and easy to navigate. Perfect for UX designers, product designers, and anyone building interfaces where users need to scan, compare, and choose from multiple options.

🎯 Key takeaway: Showing the right information at the right time isn't just about aesthetics – it's about helping users move forward, feel confident, and succeed with your product.

Chapters:

• 0:00 - Introduction: The challenge of choice

• 0:59 - The importance of progressive disclosure

• 1:13 - Upwork: Making Confident Hiring Decisions

• 3:16 - Lessons from other products (Airbnb, Duolingo, Email)

• 5:36 - Designing for the next decision

• 5:46 - Case study: Plant shop card design

• 7:07 - User feedback and redesign

• 8:31 - Testing, iteration, and final thoughts

Transcript

 Imagine that you're hiring a freelancer for your next big web design project, and you're looking through a list of potential candidates like this one here, who would you choose?

Probably not so easy to decide with this list, right? There's just not enough information.

 So if that's the case, take a look at this version of the list. Still hard to decide, right, but for a very different reason. This time there is just way too much and you're probably feeling a little bit overwhelmed.

Users are constantly making decisions like this, which plan to sign up for,  which movie or show to watch, and in this case, which freelancer to hire.

If you give them too little information to go on, then they don't have enough to decide what to do next.  But if you give them too much, they're probably gonna feel overwhelmed and just freeze.

 The question isn't just about the right amount of information to show our users. It's about how we show the right information at the right time to help them make confident decisions.

I'm Joe Formica and this is the UX Rundown. In each episode, we take a look at Real Apps, websites, and features out in the wild to see what's working, what's not, and to give you some takeaways that you can apply to design better products in your own work.

Today we're looking at Upwork, the world's biggest platform for hiring freelance talent. On Upwork, you can get a logo design, you can get a video edited or an app built by talented freelancers from all around the world.

 So with so many options, it raises the big question, how do you decide who to hire? Usually it starts by scanning through a list and looking for some of those quick signals that are gonna help you decide who might be a good fit.

You scroll, something catches your eye, and if it looks promising, maybe you click to learn a little bit more.

 This is a great example of a UX principle called Progressive Disclosure, showing just enough information to help users make a confident decision without overwhelming them.

 Progressive disclosure is one of the best ways to declutter and interface and just reduce the amount of cognitive load and information that a user has to process at one time.

 So on Upwork, each freelancer has a full profile with all of their details, but if you showed all of that upfront, it would just be way too much.

 So let's take a look at the card view. While it doesn't include everything from their profile, it surfaces exactly what users need to see first.  You get a visual sample of their work, which is important if you're trying to evaluate their style. Let's say for a graphic design project, you get a rating and a review count, and a couple other small queues that help build your trust and confidence in the quality of their work. You get to see the price, probably an important factor in your decision making along with some short labels, like top rated or one day delivery, which could be important if you're looking to get something done quick.

These cards make it easy to scan, compare, and just narrow down your options quickly without having to click through and read every single one again, it's not just about showing more information, it's about showing the right information and thinking about the criteria that users already have in their mind when they're scanning through your list and making a decision.

 Upwork does a great job of this, but they're not the only ones. you'll see the same principle applied across , well-designed products everywhere.  Airbnb knows how important it's to help people find the perfect place for their next stay, but with thousands of options in every city. They also know that the browsing experience needs to feel quick and easy to scan and compare based on the stuff that really matters to each guest. I'd imagine that Airbnb has done a ton of research into what people look for first when choosing a place to stay, and you can see that reflected right in their card view.

A photo gallery that immediately communicates the look and the vibe of the place, the price per night, the rating and review count, and helpful tags like guest favorite or Superhost. Those quick signals make it easy to scan, filter, and narrow down options without opening every single listing.

Duolingo onboarding, which has been praised and copied by designers for years, achieves a lot of that great experience through progressive disclosure as well. The onboarding could easily be presented as a long, overwhelming form. But instead, Duolingo breaks it up into simple single decisions, one question or choice at a time.

So each step feels effortless to process, and every answer clearly connects to what you see next. They reinforce this with quick wins, progress feedback, and those subtle animations and details that make the whole setup feel. Fast and rewarding, but at its core, the magic comes from giving users just the right amount of information to make one confident decision at a time and nothing more.

 Finally, here's one last great example that you probably use every day. Your email inbox. When you open your inbox, you're instantly scanning to see what needs your attention. Looking at the sender, the subject line, and a short preview of the message. And in most cases, that's just enough to decide what to open, archive, skip, or save for later if it showed any less.

You waste a lot of time clicking in and out of every email, and if it showed more, let's say the full body of every email, it would be completely overwhelming.

In each of these cases, the design helps users move forward by showing them what's most useful for the next decision that they have to make. Alright, now let's take a look at a version that does not work as well.

Case Study: Plant Shop Card Design

Here's a website for a local plant shop where you can order a plant for pickup or delivery. Clearly they have a lot of them in stock. If we take a look at the cards here, each one shows a photo, the plant name, and a very short description along with the price, and that's about it. It's clean and simple and probably what you would expect to see, and maybe for some users who know exactly what they want, this would be fine and helpful enough.

But I had a suspicion that if you're newer to plants or gardening, that you might need a little bit more information to make a choice.

If that's the case, it's likely that you're gonna spend a lot of time scrolling around, browsing, looking for information that isn't there, and eventually dropping off or buying it from somewhere else.

So I wanted to put this to the test to see just how helpful these cards actually are in choosing a plant and more importantly, see if there's anything we could do to improve them. So I ran a design survey in Lyssna.

In the survey, I showed these cards and I asked participants a few questions to gauge how helpful they were in choosing a plan.

I also included an open-ended question at the end of the study asking users about other information that would help them scan more efficiently and make a more confident decision.

Here's what we learned. For the most part, people said that the cards were somewhat helpful, but more importantly, they shared why.

 Some of the big themes that came out of it were people wanting to know just how easy or hard the plant was to take care of amount of sunlight, watering, and care that it needed.

They wanted to know if it was good for indoors and outdoors and if it was actually going to thrive in their space, there was some other interesting kind of unexpected feedback that was helpful as well.  Some people wanted to know the size and get a better idea of what the plant would look like in their space, along with multiple people who mentioned wanting to know if it was toxic for their pets.

Basically people could see what the plant looked like and what it's called. And while that's a good starting point, there are definitely some areas to improve from this feedback.

It's probably safe to say that a lot of these users would be dropping off or giving up after scanning for a while. So let's focus on improving it take a look at this quick redesign that I made based off of the feedback.

I added some details about the care level lighting environment, included some photos that give a better idea of the size and how it looks in the space. And this didn't require a ton of creativity for me.

I was really just responding to the feedback and the things that our own users said would be helpful. So with this new and hopefully improved redesign of the cards, it was now time to put it to the test and see if it actually made a difference. I ran a preference test in Lyssna.

This is a simple, super effective way to compare multiple designs in this case, head to head with our first version and our updated one.  I ran the study and people overwhelmingly chose the updated cards. I also had an open-ended question at the end to get a little bit more information about why they chose that one, and just as expected, the answers lined up with a lot of the earlier feedback, and we even got a few new ideas for some future iterations and improvements.

This quick measurable improvement that we just made along with all the other examples we looked at, really show the importance not only of quick feedback and iteration, but how important it is to surface the right information at the right time.

You can do that well, you will help your users move forward towards their goals, feel more confident, and be more successful with your product almost instantly.

 Do you have an example of an app, website, or feature that does this well? Something that makes it easy for users to scan and just as easy for them to make a confident decision. If so, drop that in the comments.

If you enjoyed this rundown, like and subscribe for some more real world breakdowns and most importantly, if you're ready to reduce the drop off in your own product, improve conversions, and help users feel more confident in their decisions, head over to Lyssna.com and get started for free today.

Thanks.