UX
Guiding New Users Without Slowing Down the Regulars
The prompts and tooltips that helped first-timers find their way were the same ones daily users clicked past a dozen times a day.
Two axes, not one
Shows expertise (new to expert) and attention (exploring to heads-down) as two independent axes, then overlays the diagonal a typical persona draws, collapsing them into a single beginner-versus-busy line and mislabeling half of real users.
Two paths across one screen
The same screen traced by two users: a beginner's wandering, feature-sampling path versus a routine user's straight muscle-memory line to a single action. Same UI, opposite needs.
The cost of guidance
A guidance prompt shown helping the exploring user and taxing the focused one, an attention meter that fills as helpful nudges accumulate into interruptions.
Designing for mode, not just level
Before and after split: one interface tuned to a blended persona leaves both groups half-served; a mode-aware interface satisfies discovery and speed at the same time.
Challenge
Ennabl's personas sorted users along one line, new to expert, and quietly assumed new users had attention to spare while experts were always in a hurry. The two things aren't related. A brand-new user can be heads-down trying to finish one task; a seasoned user can be poking around a corner of the product they've never opened. So every decision that leaned on the blended persona — onboarding coaching, feature spotlights, confirmation steps — helped one kind of user and got in the way of another.
Process
The work started by pulling that one persona apart into two axes: expertise, how well someone knows the product, and intent, whether they're exploring or trying to finish. Then every existing UI pattern got re-examined against both axes instead of one — not "is this user a beginner or an expert," but "are they here to learn or here to finish?"
Research
The root cause was a category error baked into the persona itself. "Beginner" had come to mean "has attention to spare," and "expert" had come to mean "in a hurry," so the team kept optimizing a single tradeoff between guidance and speed. But the routine user the designers pictured wasn't a busy expert — it was a habitual, task-focused user running on muscle memory inside a narrow workflow, and that shows up at every experience level. Design for the diagonal and no one sits exactly on it.
Design
The interface stopped treating guidance as a property of the user and started treating it as a property of the moment. Discovery affordances — coaching, spotlights, explanatory empty states — got tied to signals of exploration instead of account age, and made cheap to dismiss and easy to call back. High-frequency paths were stripped of interruptions so muscle memory could run, no matter how new the account was.
Outcome
Guidance and speed stopped being a single slider to compromise on. New users kept the scaffolding that helped them learn, daily users stopped fighting prompts meant for someone they no longer were, and debates that used to stall on "which persona are we designing for?" resolved on the real question: is this a learning moment or a doing moment?