---
title: "Evaluating the Usability of Collapsible Sections (or jQuery’s Content Toggle)"
date: 2013-03-25
description: "$( document ).ready(function() { // Handler for .ready() called. $("
canonical_url: https://idratherbewriting.com/2013/03/25/evaluating-the-usability-of-collapsible-sections-or-jquerys-content-toggle/
---
# Evaluating the Usability of Collapsible Sections (or jQuery’s Content Toggle)
You can implement collapsible sections in several ways. In Flare, you can insert drop-down hotspots from a quick button on the ribbon. In Drupal, you can use the [Collapse Text module](https://drupal.org/project/collapse_text). In Wordpress, you can use the [Collapse-O-Matic plugin](http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/jquery-collapse-o-matic/). The theme I'm using (Canvas from woothemes) has collapsible sections built directly in.

You can also code the sections directly using [jQuery through the Toggle method](http://api.jquery.com/toggle/). For example, if you wanted to toggle a section with the ID "section" so it appeared in an expand/collapse state, you would insert a reference to the jQuery library in script tags, and then insert another script like this:

In the above code, #section is the unique ID of the element you want to toggle. (Including the twisting arrows is more complex.)

Wikipedia's mobile pages use collapsible sections by default. Here's [an example](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummies) if you want to explore collapsible sections a bit more.

## Problems with the Collapsible Sections

Collapsible sections are cool but somewhat problematic. One person [commented](https://idratherbewriting.com/2013/03/16/how-to-organize-page-level-content/#comment-32890):

> I really like collapsible sections, but I've encountered some usability issues with them (searches won't look in collapsed sections, users might not know which section contains the info that they want). It would be great if you could search for something and the search result would auto-expand the correct section, but I haven't seen that.

Another person asked via email:

> How have users reacted to having to use progressively disclose the information by clicking? I ask because I received negative feedback when I incorporated togglers in Flare at a previous company.

Are collapsible sections really a best practice for help documentation, or do they just present more problems?