Key takeaways
Show progress, so that the open loop stays in view: people want to finish what they have started.
Use progress bars and checklists on complex tasks to encourage completion.
Origins
The effect is named after the Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik (1900–1988), a member of the Berlin School of experimental psychology who later joined the circle of Lev Vygotsky. In the 1920s, after her teacher Kurt Lewin noticed that waiters seemed to remember unpaid orders better than paid ones, she compared memory for interrupted and completed tasks and found that the interrupted ones were recalled better.
In practice
- Show a profile-completion meter or an onboarding checklist.
- Save drafts, and offer to continue where the person left off.
- Don’t overdo open loops: nagging manipulates, and it erodes trust.
Further reading
- The Zeigarnik Effect: Why it is so hard to leave things incomplete — Abhishek Chakraborty | Medium.com
- Zeigarnik Effect — Coglode
- Zeigarnik Effect on Wikipedia — Wikipedia
- Zeigarnik Effect on Laws of UX — Jon Yablonski
The illustration is our own, drawn after the idea of this law’s card in Laws of UX by Jon Yablonski.
