When designing complex applications, practitioners often feel pressure to center efforts around “power” users: highly trained professionals with deep domain knowledge and years of experience using the software in question. While these expert users are important, focusing solely on them means overlooking other critical user types.

This tendency reflects a deeper issue: the overly simplistic assumption that complex-app users fall into one of two categories: either novices or experts. In reality, this binary framing fails to account for the users who don’t fit cleanly into either category — such as long-term users who never achieved deep system mastery, or domain experts who are new to the software and still learning how to navigate complex workflows. Failing to recognize these nuances results in exclusionary design, inefficient workflows, and missed opportunities to improve user experience.

Three Complex Apps User Types

To move beyond the novice-expert binary, we need a more nuanced understanding of how people actually engage with complex applications.

Complex applications are systems designed to support specialized workflows, often involving multiple user roles, advanced configurations, and domain-specific operations. 

These tools demand higher levels of cognitive load and feature density compared to typical consumer apps, and they attract a broad range of users whose experience with the software varies widely.

When I coach people to design better complex applications, I highlight three distinct complex-app user profiles whose needs, behaviors, and limitations are often misunderstood or overlooked.

• The Legacy: The long-term user with deep familiarity but low efficiency
• The Legend: The power user who has achieved expert-level proficiency
• The Learner: The domain expert who is new to the software and still building system knowledge

Each of these user types presents distinct design challenges and opportunities that are often overlooked in design decisions and roadmap planning.

1. The Legacy

A legacy user has used the software for years or even decades but hasn’t become truly efficient. Longevity has not translated into true system expertise or understanding. We often mistake legacy users for power users, assuming that frequent and long-term use equates to deep system expertise. However, many of these users continue using the system inefficiently for decades, learning and utilizing only what they need to get by, rather than the system as a whole.

Legacy users often:

• Use rigid, familiar methods to accomplish tasks
• Avoid customization and stick to system defaults
• Use only a narrow slice of the application’s features
• Develop workarounds (e.g., bookmarks, personal notes, manual processes)

How Legacy Users Are Left Behind

Legacy users are often viewed as resistant to change. The assumption is that they simply don’t want to learn new methods and fear any design modifications, optimizations, or usability improvements. But, in reality, what they often fear is loss of productivity, not change itself. 

Many of these users have adapted to suboptimal workflows over time and are wary of changes that disrupt what little efficiency they have established. 

As one complex-apps practitioner explained, this resistance often stems from deep habits and experience with the existing system:

It wasn’t what they were used to. There was that resistance to change. They have great muscle memory. They have great experience. They know workarounds on how to maneuver or how to operate certain things.

These ingrained behaviors can make it difficult for legacy users to recognize inefficiencies or adapt to new workflows, even when those workflows are objectively better designed.

How to Support Legacy Users

Supporting legacy users means recognizing that familiarity doesn’t always equal mastery, and that productivity, not resistance, is often at the heart of their hesitation. The key is to introduce improvements with change-aversion in mind — in a way that feels safe, respectful of their workflows, and clearly beneficial. 

To support legacy users:

• Avoid sudden, large-scale UI changes that disrupt learned behaviors
• Communicate upcoming changes early and clearly
• Provide the option to keep legacy views or workflows during transition periods
• Offer low-risk beta environments to explore new features
• Involve them in usability testing and rollout feedback loops
• Emphasize feature discoverability, especially for time-saving shortcuts

2. The Legend

A legend user is a system expert who has reached a high level of efficiency and fluency within the application. They’ve mastered shortcuts, customized their workflows, and are often deeply embedded in user communities or advisory roles.

We often hear from legend users the most through channels such as forums, beta launches, and customer advisory groups. Their influence can be substantial, and their requests often reflect deep technical understanding and a desire for even greater user control and freedom.

Legends often:

• Use keyboard shortcuts, macros, and accelerators extensively
• Advocate for advanced features and customization
• Desire and request greater flexibility in workflows and outputs
• Engage heavily in feedback channels, user communities, or advisory boards

How Legend Users Are Left Behind

Legend users introduce two different but significant risks.

First, their feedback may be over-prioritized (either due to their willingness to vocalize their desires or insistence from the business that they are the most “valuable” users). While their input is valuable, over-prioritizing it can skew product decisions toward edge-case, high-effort features that don’t benefit the broader user base. This risks bloated features and added complexity for everyone else.

Second, their continued usage of the system is often taken for granted by the business. It’s easy to assume that because they’ve mastered the system, they’ll remain loyal. But even legends have limits. When they hit a performance ceiling — or see better, more efficient tools emerge elsewhere — they may abandon the product in search of greater speed, flexibility, or control.

One complex-app practitioner reflected on this competitive pressure from newer, more agile tools:

A lot of other technologies have been innovative and disruptive in the last 15 years. More [companies] have been able to create their own tools and software, and it’s like, ‘Wow, you can really get going and do things way faster and easier [with other tools].’

If organizations assume legend users will always stay loyal, they risk overlooking the very real need to continually improve performance and usability for this group.

How to Support Legend Users

Supporting legend users means treating them not just as vocal power users, but as valuable early indicators of system limitations and opportunities. They need continued innovation to stay engaged, and product teams need to listen with discernment, balancing their input with broader user needs.

To support legend users:

• Don’t assume loyalty; continue to innovate and optimize
• Conduct regular competitive audits to understand what other tools offer
• Provide advanced features without compromising core usability
• Invite legend users into early betas or pilot programs to test high-efficiency features
• Recognize and celebrate their contributions, but avoid letting their preferences overrule broader design priorities

3. The Learner

The learner is new to the system but not the domain. They bring deep subject-matter expertise but limited familiarity with the system’s workflows, features, and capabilities.

We often assume that learners will simply “figure it out” through training or forced repetition. But without early support, these users may never gain the confidence or fluency needed to use the system effectively. Worse, they may develop workarounds that bypass core features, or disengage entirely due to mistrust in the system.

Learners often:

• Learn by doing, diving into the interface without any true onboarding
• Struggle with discovering key functions or the most efficient workflows
• Lack confidence in whether they are using the system correctly
• Misunderstand system capabilities or misinterpret outputs due to gaps in system knowledge

How Learners Are Marginalized

Learners are frequently dismissed with the assumption that their struggles are “training issues” — that if they just had more instruction, they’d succeed.

One practitioner summarized the prevailing attitude as:

[Leaders] oftentimes think that it’s still the idea of, ‘Well, people go to school to learn how to use our stuff, so we don’t really have to worry about that part of the user experience.’

But this mindset shifts the burden of usage from design to users. While training may supplement the learning process, even great training and documentation cannot compensate for poor usability or unintuitive workflows.

If learners aren’t supported during their first encounters with the system, they may never progress to true efficiency or expertise. They will remain dependent, error-prone, and at risk of churning, or worse, transition into Legacy users who never truly master the tool.

How to Support Learners

Supporting learners requires a strong focus on initial usability and progressive learning. It’s about shortening the path from initial usage to proficient usage without relying on a formal training program to bridge the gap.

Consider the following tactics to support this group:

• Prioritize learnability in design
• Use inline help, onboarding flows, and just-in-time tips
• Avoid relying on dense documentation or external training programs
• Create safe environments (e.g., sandboxes or templates) to encourage low-risk exploration
• Provide meaningful error messages that include actionable next steps
• Conduct longitudinal usability testing to observe learning over time

Balancing All Three User Types

Designing successful complex applications means more than choosing whether to support novice or expert users. That question presents a false dichotomy. 

In reality, sustainable product success that delivers on business goals — from long-term user retention to reduced churn and higher satisfaction — requires thoughtful support for all three user types. Each represents a different point on the user journey, and each offers critical insights for improving the system as a whole.

Each group offers unique insights:

• Learners reveal where onboarding, discoverability, and digital content (including domain-specific language) need improvement
• Legacies highlight which features remain unwanted, underutilized, or unnecessarily complex
• Legends surface opportunities for deep feature use, innovation, automation, and long-term efficiency gains

These users should not be treated as static categories. A learner can become a legend — or a legacy — depending on the support they receive and the design choices made over time. Designing for just one of these groups creates long-term risk. Supporting all three builds a more resilient, effective, and loyal user base.