CONCEPT
Progressive Affordance Disclosure
The Norman volume's proposed design pattern for conversational AI — <em>revealing capabilities dynamically through dialogue</em> rather than statically through fixed interface layouts, extending Norman's progressive disclosure into the conversational medium.
Progressive disclosure was a cornerstone of Norman's usability framework: reveal complexity to users gradually, matching their evolving expertise rather than presenting everything at once (overwhelming) or nothing at all (opaque). The classic example is the word processor that shows basic editing tools to novices and reveals advanced formatting as expertise develops. The pattern worked because the underlying capability space was discrete and hierarchical — features could be arranged from simple to advanced and disclosed accordingly. The AI interface defeats this arrangement: capabilities are unbounded and person-relative. Progressive affordance disclosure is the Norman volume's name for the design pattern that preserves the function of progressive disclosure in a medium where its traditional implementation is impossible.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The challenge progressive affordance disclosure addresses is the person-dependent nature of AI affordances. A single system can produce a basic script for a novice and a sophisticated distributed architecture for an expert. The capabilities are identical; what varies is the user's articulational capacity. A static