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Slowly revealing new buttons is probably not a good idea, since UIs that change on their own are confusing; things are never the way you expect them to be. Sim

Slowly revealing new buttons is probably not a good idea, since UIs that change on their own are confusing; things are never the way you expect them to be. Similarly, searching doesn't work well for beginners, because they don't know what to search for. If you only know what you want the result to be, and not how to get there, or what features you need to achieve the desired result, it's easier if you can just click on things you see, and undo changes if they're going in the wrong direction. Microsoft tried pretty much everything they could think of in Word, attempting to do exactly what you're suggesting: make an app that works for professionals, but is discoverable for beginners. This is where things like Clippy came from. It's really, really hard to get this right.

Detrus 15y ago
Clippy is plopping intrusive tutorials on top of a complex interface. It's not a serious attempt at execution, it's bureaucratic incompetence. What I'm talking about is more akin to Google and Wolfram, when they give you an answer to a math problem. When you ask "how much water is in the oceans" it would try to figure out if you meant volume, show you related formulas, etc. Similarly for a photo editor you'd say "make the head bigger" and it would list the features one would need, like the selection and resize tools. So if you only know what the result should be, use keywords to find features, then click to see if they're the right features. It's perfectly doable, just hasn't been attempted.