Goal-Gradient Effect
The tendency to approach a goal increases with proximity to the goal.
Proximity is an accelerant
The closer users are to completing a task, the faster they work towards reaching it.
Motivate
Providing artificial progress towards a goal will help to ensure users have the motivation to complete that task.
Progress
Provide a clear indication of progress in order to motivate users to complete tasks.
Origin
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 extensively with animals (e.g., Anderson 1933; Brown 1948; for a review, see Heilizer 1977), its implications for human behavior and decision making are understudied. Furthermore, this issue has important theoretical and practical implications for intertemporal consumer behavior in reward programs (RPs) and other types of motivational systems (e.g. Deighton 2000; Hsee, Yu, and Zhang 2003; Kivetz 2003; Lal and Bell 2003).