Designing with Tension: What the Zeigarnik Effect Reveals About Memory and Momentum

Have you ever noticed how an unfinished task — or a cliffhanger at the end of a show — keeps tugging at your attention?

How can the Zeigarnik effect’s lingering cognitive tension help us design products, services, and experiences that people actually come back to and complete?

When you learn to harness the motivational pull of “unfinished business,” you can turn mundane flows into engaging journeys and guide users toward the outcomes that matter.
 We explore why interruptions strengthen memory, and how designers can translate that insight into progress indicators, cliffhangers, and gentle nudges that drive completion. 

WHAT WE COVER IN THIS EPISODE

• What exactly is the Zeigarnik effect, and how did a Soviet psychologist discover it?
• Why do incomplete or interrupted tasks stay fresher in memory than those we’ve finished?
• How can we use progress bars, checklists, and multi‑step flows to leverage this effect?
• Where do cliffhangers shine in learning experiences and content design?
• When does the tension of “unfinished” backfire — and how can we avoid creating frustration?
• Practical tips for highlighting next steps, surfacing partially completed work, and prompting return visits. 

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Incomplete tasks create cognitive tension that keeps the goal top‑of‑mind until it’s resolved.
 • Surface that tension: show users where they left off, how close they are to done, or what’s still missing.
 • Use visual progress cues (percentages, steps, checkmarks) to make completion feel imminent and achievable.
 • Strategic interruptions — like well‑placed cliffhangers or mid‑flow saves — can boost later recall and re‑engagement.
 • Balance is key: too much friction or ambiguity can turn motivating tension into annoyance.

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Transcript

Welcome to The Design Psychologist, the show that helps you use psychology to design
better experiences. I'm Thomas Watkins, your guide to becoming a more powerful
psychology -informed designer. If you ever finished watching the season finale to your
favorite show, only to find it ends in a cliffhanger, something dramatic happens and
you have no idea how the characters are going to move forward and later your mind
drifts back to it wondering how are they going to resolve that or think about being
in the middle of a task maybe writing an email or replying to an important text
and you get interrupted you were really into it almost done but then something
pulled you away and later day you think about it and it jumps back into your head
and you say, "Ah, I need to go back and finish that thing." What if I told you
that unfinished or interrupted tasks actually have an advantage in memory?
That's a psychological phenomenon known as the "Zygarnik" effect. But the Zygarnik
effect isn't just a quirky memory trick. It can be a powerful design tool.
Think about that cliffhanger. The tension of the incomplete is what pulls us back
in. In this episode, we'll explore how to use that tension intentionally,
whether it's to make mundane tasks more engaging or to help people remember what
they started or nudge them toward completing something important. How does being
erupted, shape our memory and how can we use this insight to design better products,
services, and experiences? So I want to introduce this idea by reading a passage
about Kurt Levine or Kurt Lewin. Kurt Levine was his name in German and when he
moved to the United States, it was Kurt Lewin. He was a German -American psychologist
in the 1920s and '30s, who had a big impact on the field.
Picture this. It's the late 1920s and we're in Berlin, an intellectual powerhouse of
Europe at the time. Berlin is a city active with innovation where science, art, and
culture collide. Now imagine yourself sitting in one of Berlin's lively cafes. At one
of these cafes sits a small group of psychology students deeply engaged in
conversation. Among them is the esteemed Kurt Lewin. He's there with one of his
brightest students, Bluma Zeigarnik. They're discussing the workings of the mind and
how people perceive and interact with the world around them. The café is bustling
with life, waiters dart between tables, balancing trays filled with coffee cups and
plates of pastries. During this visit, Bluma Zygarnik and Kurt Lewin noticed something
very interesting. Their waiter had a perfect memory without writing anything down of
all the orders at the table. But here's where things get interesting. Once the table
settled the bill and the meal was complete, the waiter seemed to forget all of the
details of the order. Bluma was fascinated by this. How can the waiters be so sharp
and precise when the order is still pending yet be so forgetful when the task is
done. Bluma and Kurt began discussing this, intrigued by the phenomenon.
They theorized that perhaps the unfinished tasks create some kind of cognitive tension
that keeps it on their mind. Now, Luan had already been developing a theory that
we'll get to in a moment that contained the concept of cognitive tension that helped
to drive motivation and behavior. So after this cafe visit,
Bluma Zeigarnik decides to test this hypothesis back in the lab and she ends up
taking on a series of experiments that become her doctoral dissertation. She conducts
a series of experiments that involve people solving puzzles and math problems. And
when they're in the session, they're sometimes getting interrupted from solving their
problems and other times getting a chance to complete it. When the participants think
that the experiment is done, Bluma then asks them about the details of the puzzles
or the math problems that they're solving. And she finds something very interesting
that people had a better memory and situations where the puzzle or the math problem
had been interrupted. This ended up being called the Zeigarnik effect,
named after Bluma herself. Now this demonstrated one aspect of Kurt Lewin's theory,
and we won't get into all of the details of it, but Kurt Lewin had a lot of
interesting theories, and one theory was about this thing called the life space. And
it was the idea that a human being exists not just as themselves with their own
mind but surrounded by a life space. And Kurt Lewin would sometimes describe this
with a drawn image of an oval that represented the environment somebody is in and
then a little circle on one end of the oval that represents the person. But all in
all, the irrelevant thing here is that there was an idea of cognitive tension.
Something is incomplete and therefore inflicts some kind of cognitive tension on our
minds that keeps it somehow relevant on our mind. It keeps it somehow floating
toward the top of our mind and not getting forgotten. So we're going to talk a
little bit about how this applies, but let us take a moment to appreciate the fact
that this is not obvious. So when we're thinking about what would help us remember
things, it's not obvious that tension would be something that plays a role in it.
It's definitely not obvious that a memory would be stronger in the middle of a
task, and then once you complete it, something about the completeness makes it less
relevant. That's not something that's necessarily intuitive. So all in all,
this is a effect that would be known as something that's counterintuitive. It goes
against how we probably would think that we would remember things. So people commonly
recognize this phenomenon, right? If you're watching a series and there's a
cliffhanger, most people are probably aware that that cliffhanger is put there on
purpose to make us continue to be interested in it. We might not know the name of
it, but we can kind of tell that when we don't know what happens next that might
make us more interested. For example, there's a technique of introducing an open
question at the end of a curriculum so that the idea will remain on students'
minds. And there are other pedagogical applications as well, Sometimes,
breaking up lessons into incomplete segments or intentionally leaving key parts or key
concepts incomplete while a student is learning them, encouraging students to think
about things before they get the full picture or the full idea. All of these things
enhance retention and they are arguably related to what we think of as the
Zeigarnick effect. This idea also has relevance when thinking about user interface
design. Think about progress indicators where a task seems almost complete but not
quite. Perhaps you are filling out a form that has to be submitted and you can see
some kind of indicator of how close you are to the end or you're in an onboarding
process. And the fact that you're not quite finished but almost finished, makes it
noticeable that you have that much more work to do. And it kind of provides a
motivator. Think about a multi -step checkout process that has discrete steps,
and you can kind of get a sense of how complete you are, and you have full
awareness of the fact that you're not complete. And if you get interrupted, you kind
of remember that you weren't finished with the task. or think about a task list of
to -do items where some of the items are not checked off and the unchecked items
become noticeable and that becomes part of a motivation for completing it, and you
can remember that you haven't completed it. Or if you complete the task list, it
kind of frees your mind of thinking about the tasks and you get a sense of
completion and you're done with it and maybe don't remember the details of the task
anymore. So overall, the Zeigarnik effect reminds us that unfinished tasks create a
kind of cognitive tension, one that lingers in the mind and pulls us back in,
and that's a powerful lever for design. By tapping into this natural tension,
we can create experiences that gently guide people toward completing things. When
users see that a task is almost done, that open loop can be the nudge they need
to follow through. In user interfaces, this might mean highlighting incomplete steps
or showing progress indicators. In education, it might mean ending a lecture on a
provocative question to keep students mentally engaged after class.
Whether it's through multi -step flows or visual cues or well -placed cliff hangers,
we can draw attention to what remains unfinished and in doing so, design for
momentum because sometimes it's not just what's completed that matters, but what's
left open and how that unfinished thread keeps us coming back.