Applying the Goal Gradient Effect

I was reading an interesting post on Reddit on product psychology, and it reminded me of the Goal Gradient Effect.

This effect tells us that:

  • The closer to their goal the more motivated people are.
  • As people get closer to a reward, they speed up to get to their goal faster.
  • People are motivated by how much is left to reach their target, not how far they’ve come.

The author also gave a pretty good example: “Profile Strength” progress bar on LinkedIn makes customers more likely to complete their profile.

This got me thinking of my own project Codr — an edu coding platform. It was missing a stimuli to motivate users to solve more challenges and climb the ranks. A simple progress indicator is actually very ideal in such a case, so that’s what I quickly added.

Article reference: https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/kxs2u1/6_cognitive_biases_effects_mental_shortcuts_used/

Adding progress bars is peanuts, you can find a ton of html/css/js code which you can tweak, I used this one: https://css-tricks.com/css3-progress-bars/

Happy coding ❤

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Become a rockstar programmer and try to reach genius status on codr https://nevolin.be/codr/

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