Topic: Zeigarnik Effect

AJAX and the Zeigarnik Effect

Dietrich Kappe, Tuesday, May 30, 2006 @ 9:00 am

My colleague Bob Moll over in the UXD blog writes about the Zeigarnick Effect and it's implication for designing GUI's. What is the Zeigarnick Effect? Bluma Zeigarnick was a Russian psychologist who in the 1920's discovered that we remember unfinished tasks much better than completed ones. This memory comes from a psychological pressure to complete unfinished tasks.

Bob notes that in a rich GUI, the psychological pressure is to detour and finish short tasks, leaving a trail of longer, unfinished tasks. He suggests that we include a facility for a queue of unfinished tasks in applications so that users can easily go back and finish them.

In the web application world, we avoided this aspect of the Zeigarnick Effect by making it difficult if not impossible for the user to diverge from the page flow. Now, with the capability to use fancy modal dialogs that interact with the server, we can add optional subtasks into the flow. AJAX-powered command completion helps prevent the the user wandering off in another window to search for the right thing to enter. My favorite example is the WSJ's selection-based search, which avoid interrupted reading to search for another term.

As you design your applications, give some thought to the Zeigarnick Effect and how you can use AJAX to smooth the continuation of interrupted tasks.

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