Overview
The tendency to approach a goal increases with proximity to the goal.
Takeaways
- Providing artificial progress towards a goal will help to ensure users are more likley to have the motivation to complete that task.
- The closer users are to completing a task, the faster they work towards reaching it.
- Motivation can be enhanced by visually representing progress and completion, e.g. progress bars.
Origins
The goal-gradient hypothesis, originally proposed by the behaviorist Clark Hull in 1932, states that the tendency to approach a goal increases with proximity to the goal. In a classic experiment that tests this hypothesis, Hull (1934) found that rats in a straight alley ran progressively faster as they proceeded from the starting box to the food. Although the goal-gradient hypothesis has been investigated exten-sively with animals (e.g., Anderson 1933; Brown 1948; for a review, see Heilizer 1977), its implications for human behavior and decision making are understudied. Further-more, this issue has important theoretical and practical implications for intertemporal consumer behavior in reward programs (hereinafter RPs) and other types of motivational systems (e.g., Deighton 2000; Hsee, Yu, and Zhang 2003; Kivetz 2003; Lal and Bell 2003).
Further Reading
Moving the Finish Line: The Goal Gradient Hypothesis
Designing for motivation with the goal-gradient effect
The Goal-Gradient Hypothesis Resurrected: Purchase Acceleration, Illusionary Goal Progress, and Customer Retention
The importance of percent-done progress indicators for computer-human interfaces
Related
Fitts’s Law
The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.
Law of Common Region
Elements tend to be perceived into groups if they are sharing an area with a clearly defined boundary.
Law of Proximity
Objects that are near, or proximate to each other, tend to be grouped together.