---
name: Endowed progress
slug: endowed-progress
category: pattern
status: published
created: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
modified: 2026-08-25T00:00:00.000Z
definition: Starting a progress meter part filled, so the reader feels they are
  continuing something already begun rather than starting from nothing.
aliases:
  - name: endowed progress effect
    source: community
  - name: artificial advancement
    source: community
  - name: head start progress
    source: community
  - name: upfront progress
    source: goodui
tags:
  - gamification
  - progress
relations:
  contrastWith:
    - goal-gradient
    - steps-left
    - labor-illusion
  variantOf: []
  partOf: []
  seeAlso:
    - progress-bar
implementations: []
sources:
  - title: "GoodUI: Try Upfront Progress instead of starting with a blank"
    url: https://goodui.org/
demo: inline
exhibit: false
useWhen: the progress bar starts at 20 percent before you did anything
---

Endowed progress is the trick of handing someone a task that has already been started.
Joseph Nunes and Xavier Dreze gave car wash customers loyalty cards in 2006: one group got
a card with eight spaces, the other a card with ten spaces and two stamps already applied.
Both cards took eight washes to complete. The endowed card was completed almost twice as
often. Nothing about the work changed, only whether the first mark on the card belonged to
the customer or to the shop.

The reframing is the mechanism. A blank card asks you to start something, and starting is
the expensive part of any task, because a thing not yet begun is nothing to abandon. A card
with two marks on it asks you to continue something, and it also places you further along a
scale whose end is in view. That second half is why the two terms in this pair keep getting
confused: the [goal gradient](/goal-gradient) is about effort rising as the end comes into
sight, while endowed progress is about where the meter is allowed to start. One is a claim
about the last stretch, the other about the first.

The honest versions of the pattern are the ones where the head start is real and merely
counted. An [onboarding checklist](/onboarding-checklist) that arrives with "create your
account" already ticked is not inventing anything: the reader did that, it was work, and
leaving it off the list would understate what is done. The same goes for a signup flow that
counts the email address collected on the previous screen. [Steps left](/steps-left) is the
sober relative of both, promising a length rather than a position, and it is the thing an
endowed meter must not contradict.

The effect is real, which is exactly why the dishonest version is worth naming. Presenting
invented progress as earned is where the pattern turns: a bar that starts at 20 percent for
everyone, with no account of what that 20 percent was, teaches the reader that the number
does not mean anything, and it costs more than the small push it bought. Say where the head
start came from ("two stamps on us"), and never inflate the denominator to hide the same
work under a friendlier fraction. The pattern's strength is that it changes the framing
without changing the deal, so changing the deal is not a stronger version of it.