How People Feel about Progress: Metrics That Drive User Behavior
Sep 7, 2024
How you measure and present performance metrics can really influence how people feel about their progress.
It’s the simple choices — whether it’s what you decide to count, how you display it, or how you explain it — that can either motivate people to push forward or make them feel like they’re falling short.
A lot of times we focus on consistency. And that’s for good reason — it works. When people can see a record of their past successes, it fires them up to stick with their goals. It’s like a reminder that they’ve done it before, and they can do it again. Consistency builds momentum, which is key to staying motivated.
Here’s something to consider — put too much weight on being consistent, and it leads you to a state of perfectionism. Many start to feel like anything less than perfect is a failure and that “all-or-nothing” mindset makes the journey harder. So instead of feeling good about progress, people get discouraged if they stumble, making it harder for them to reach their goals.
Streaks and Fresh Starts
Let’s look at two common strategies from Behavioral Science that often appear in performance metrics: Streaks and Fresh Starts.
Streaks motivate users to keep up a consistent behavior, like logging into an app every day.
Fresh Starts give users a clean slate to start over, like setting new goals at the beginning of the year. The effect of this “clean slate” is part of why New Year’s Resolutions are so popular.
Both strategies tap into the same basic motivation — people love keeping a flawless streak. But keep in mind — the very thing that drives us to keep going has a built-in flaw. Perfection is all or nothing.
There’s a huge difference between hitting 99% and getting that perfect 100%. And once you slip, there’s no going back to perfect.
In statistics, when something can only be one of two options, it’s called a “dummy variable.” Kind of fitting here. ‘Perfect’ is a dummy variable in more ways than one.
Things like fresh starts, streaks, perfection — they’re just ways of framing the data. They only matter because of how we decide to measure performance. These are all artifacts of the metrics we choose to track. So, even when one stumbles, we’ve got plenty of ways to keep them motivated.
That’s key when you’re thinking about the metrics your app tracks. The real impact comes not from the numbers themselves but from how you present them to the user.
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