Endowed Progress Effect

How do you motivate users to create good habits and complete their goals?

For our most recent project, we used these behavior design techniques to help students complete their coursework.

When a user signed up for a course, we used the endowed progress effect to give them some momentum towards completing the course. For example, the first task towards course completion is downloading the syllabus, which gave users 7% toward their course completion.

It’s much less daunting to log in and see a 7% progress completion than 0%.

Do you guys ever think about this stuff?