This article is based on a Q&A with InCheq VP of Customer Success Brianna Van Zanten and Greg Kihlström for The Agile Brand Guide’s Expert Mode series.
Most customer experience roadmaps are addition problems. Another personalization rule, one more touchpoint in the lifecycle, a new content series, an extra prompt in the onboarding flow. Budget gets approved on the same logic. The experience gets better because there’s more of it.
Brianna Van Zanten reads the evidence the other way. As VP of Customer Success at InCheq, a task-management platform where frontline workers scan a QR code to complete and verify work, she spends her days watching people use software they didn’t choose. Her training is in cognitive science and psychology, and the conclusion she draws is that most of what we add is a tax the user pays on our behalf. Asked to argue for subtraction, she argued for it, then went out of her way to mark where the argument stops working.
Every Option You Add Is a Decision Someone Else Has to Make
The case for adding is easy to make in a planning meeting. More paths means more of the audience finds the one meant for them. But a path isn’t free to the person looking at it, and every option we present is a decision we’ve assigned.
“More personalization, more touchpoints, and more content can sound like a better experience on paper, but every additional option also gives the user another decision to make. At a certain point, that creates cognitive load and choice overload… when users have too many buttons, paths, or decisions in front of them, they have to work harder just to figure out what they are supposed to do next. The better experience is often the one that feels almost obvious. If someone wants to start, they hit Start.”
For those of us reviewing a roadmap, the practical move is to audit the flow for decisions rather than features. Count the moments where a user has to choose. That number is closer to perceived ease of use, the belief that a system will be effortless, and it predicts adoption better than most of what ends up on a comparison chart. Van Zanten doesn’t let the argument run away with itself. Simplicity, she says, “should not mean stripping out information a customer actually needs, especially when the task is complex, unfamiliar, or high-stakes.” Her test is worth bringing to the next prioritization review: are we adding this because it genuinely removes friction for the customer, or because we have the ability to add it? Most roadmap items fail that question in about thirty seconds.
What “Rewarding Attention” Actually Buys You
Van Zanten frames experience optimization as two things: reducing cognitive load, and rewarding attention. The second half is where most teams reach for points and badges. She means something narrower, and pointed to a rollout with 7-Eleven store managers to explain it, where the surprise was that the product read as a trust mechanism rather than a surveillance one.
“A specific moment in that workflow can be as simple as an employee finishing a task and taking a photo or completing a check in InCheq. It may only be one or two extra clicks and less than a minute added to something they were already doing, but now their work has a timestamp, a record, and evidence behind it. Psychologically, that changes the interaction because the employee is not just saying, ‘I did this.’ Their work can speak for itself. There is a sense of ownership and pride that comes from having your effort documented and recognized, while the manager gets confidence without having to constantly check over someone’s shoulder.”
The idea underneath is an exchange rate. If we ask for attention, the return has to be visibly larger than the ask, and the user has to feel it in the moment rather than in a quarterly report. Van Zanten’s own standard is unusually concrete: two clicks should make the rest of someone’s job easier, make their work more visible, or “remove a future conversation they would otherwise have to defend themselves in.” Try that on a form field, or on the progress bar in an onboarding sequence. It’s close to what BJ Fogg captured in the Fogg Behavior Model — behavior happens when motivation, ability and a prompt land together — with the addition that the payoff has to be legible to the person doing the work. And note where the value showed up in her example. Not in the app. In the relationship between a manager and an employee, which is employee experience territory that marketing leaders tend to treat as somebody else’s budget.
The Streak Is the Warning Sign
Asked to argue against a CMO who thinks gamification is a novelty tax, Van Zanten conceded the point before defending anything. That’s rarer than it should be from someone whose product uses the mechanics.
“Points, badges, and streaks can create a quick dopamine response, but if the reward becomes more important than the actual outcome, the mechanic starts working against the product. A streak is a good example… If someone forgets something, suddenly there is an incentive to fake the work or rush through it just to keep the number alive. At that point, you are rewarding the metric instead of the behavior.”
Her alternative is small enough to sound like nothing. A user finishes a task and gets a pop-up reading “Congrats, you only have eight tasks remaining,” then later, seven. About as unglamorous as gamification gets. It taps the progress principle without introducing anything the user has to protect. She offers a clean diagnostic for the rest of us: strip the points, the streak or the badge out of the experience. If the whole thing loses its value, the mechanic was novelty. If the user still feels momentum without it, the mechanic was doing real work. Run that on a loyalty tier structure and the results are often uncomfortable, particularly where the tier is the only reason anyone returns.
Completion Is Not Engagement
Here’s where the interview earned its keep. InCheq’s users are on the clock. They finish tasks because finishing tasks is the job. Asked what transfers from that setting to a customer-facing one, Van Zanten led with the limit rather than the sales pitch.
“An InCheq user may complete a task because it is part of their job, even if the experience is not something they would choose on their own. A customer has a very different relationship with the product because they can leave. That means a high completion rate in a compliance environment does not automatically prove that the same interaction would be successful in a customer-facing one. What I would take from InCheq is the simplicity and the low effort required to get to an outcome, not the assumption that because someone completed the action, they were truly engaged by it.”
Marketing organizations import this error constantly, usually without noticing. Push an onboarding flow’s completion rate into the nineties and it gets read as evidence the flow is good, when it may only be evidence that the alternative was worse. Anyone who has watched a customer grind through a returns portal knows the difference. What transfers, in her reading, is the effort-to-reward relationship and the mechanics of clear feedback — user experience fundamentals that hold whether or not the person has a choice. What doesn’t transfer is the confidence. Captive users forgive things paying customers don’t, and a number collected from captive users will say the design is fine right up until it ships somewhere people can leave.
We keep adding because adding is legible. It shows up in a roadmap, a release note, a slide about what the team shipped. Removing a decision doesn’t photograph as well, and it’s harder to take credit for, which is most of why it doesn’t happen.
Van Zanten’s onboarding audit is a cheap place to start. Measure time to competency, the points where people slow down or ask for help, and what they still remember a month or two out. Collect feedback while the experience is fresh, then again at 30 to 60 days to see what stuck. She’ll tell you what you’ll find: onboarding is too long and asks people to hold too much at once, most of it details they won’t touch for weeks. The fix isn’t a shorter memory test. It’s putting reference material inside the moment it’s needed and leaving the rest alone. “Teach the priorities first,” as she puts it, then support retrieval later. Onboarding shouldn’t be here is everything, now you’re ready.
