What is the Zeigarnik Effect?

The Zeigarnik Effect is named after the Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik. It states that people usually remember partially completed tasks more clearly than finished ones. People feel mental pressure when a job is partially completed, so they feel like going back and completing the task they began. This effect only works for the jobs that the person started, if the job is not started only in the first place then this effect is not so successful.

There are two main ways to implement the Zeigarnik Effect in design:

• Implicit Incompletion: This approach is an indirect means to use elements such as cliffhangers to create a sense of uncertainty. These elements encourage users to stay engaged by suggesting that there is more to discover or achieve. The users themselves will not directly see the effect but indirectly will be under it. Cliffhangers create an urge to come back and complete the content that they consume.
• Explicit Incompletion: This approach directly presents users with a task that is deliberately left unfinished. This could be a partially completed form, a saved shopping cart, or a multi-step onboarding process where users are encouraged to return later. The users can see the effects at work by taking a look at the UI. You will find progress bars, notifications, emails, etc which will move you to complete the task that you started.

Users’ attention is critical for today’s competitive field of user experience (UX) design. To achieve this designers might use the Zeigarnik Effect as a powerful method that effectively grabs users’ attention. In this article, we will learn about the Zeigarnik Effect and its applications in UX Design.