Progress
Resume where you left off
Effort: Medium
What to notice
Returning visitors see their unfinished work first, labeled "continue."
How to build it
- Save drafts on the device or to the account.
- On return, offer "continue" and "start over."
- State how long drafts are kept and how to delete them.
Measure
- Main metric
- Completion rate from return visits
- Guardrail
- Requests to delete saved data
When it backfires
Do not keep nagging that work is saved.
Theory behind it
Unfinished tasks (Zeigarnik and Ovsiankina)
People tend to return to interrupted tasks. The famous claim that unfinished tasks are remembered better did not hold up in a meta-analysis.
Contested
IKEA effect
Things people build themselves feel more valuable than the same things made by others.
Limited evidence
Playable demos
Try the same mechanism in a playable demo.