You have two types of cards you can buy in a coffee shop:

1. A: 10 stamps. You stamp a box every time you buy a cup of coffee.
2. B: 12 stamps. You stamp a box every time you buy a cup of coffee. Two already stamped.

If you want to fill out the cards, how much time you need in each case? Do you need less time for A than B? the contrary?

You can say that in both cases the time will be the same. The laws of standard Economics can tell you that. Although, this is not true in practice since, there’s something that standard Economics does account for and that’s “how human acts and thinks, how he feels, what is his emotion when doing an action.” When doing this experiment, people choosing cards of type B went on to fill their cards faster than people choosing A cards. Why? This is due to what’s called Goal-gradient Effect.

This is what Behavioural Economics studies, which is quite different from what you may know about the laws of standard Economy (laws of supply and demand for instance).

Back to coffee. The impact of Goal-gradient Effect on our behaviour as humans will lead us, unconsciously, to try and complete unfinished goals faster than starting completely new ones (those that we didn’t start working on at all.) In short: in case B, this will lead us to fill in the third box faster because there are two already stamped boxes. This will make us feel that we are achieving more than stamping the first box on an A card.

To take advantage of this effect in the field of Design, User Experience (UX) and Customer Acquisition, tech companies put this into practice when designing their products. Dropbox, for example, shows how much close you are to take additional free space (the goal) by showing all the required steps and highlighting the completed ones (the same as stamped boxes).

It’s as simple as this: the closer you are to the goal, the more motivated you are to complete it. The same thing in LinkedIn. When you create your profile, LinkedIn shows you a circle that maps how much progress you’ve done and how far you are to an All-Star profile. This is mutually beneficial, to you as a user and to LinkedIn as it acquires more data about you.

The next time you design a website, an application, or a game, try to take an advantage of this for more engaged users. Keep in mind something very important about design: Our mind will give more importance to your application as long as we are using it for a longer period of time (our mind gives a greater importance to what it spends the most time on, be it useful or not!)

For more readings, enjoy these:

1. 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know about People by Susan M. Weinschenk
2. Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal