That's a fair point. And just to clarify (since you mentioned "instructions"), my references to MC above were referring just to the colored circular non-buttons

That's a fair point. And just to clarify (since you mentioned "instructions"), my references to MC above were referring just to the colored circular non-buttons discussed in the OP, and not to the "A quick primer" and "Need help with your first campaign?" instructions (which I'm assuming are always there, and are unrelated to the non-buttons… I guess it would be nice if users could dismiss these newbie instructions once they've become experienced with the site). But if these large circular non-buttons are to remain a permanent fixture on the MC Dashboard (rather than just a temporary "look, here are our new features" exercise), I still wonder why I'd want it to jiggle the blue pointer as if to say "Oh there's the place you SHOULD have clicked just now", when it could actually just take me to my obviously-desired destination immediately. That destination page would then become active on the navbar, presumably with some kind of visual indication that it is now the active one ("presumably" because I'm just speaking extemporaneously here, I haven't used MC in ages)... so the attentive user will have learned a second way to reach their desired feature (as in, "I clicked the big round button and it took me straight to the place I was expecting, and the 'Lists' item on the navbar has become active"). Then you've provided two different ways to get to the desired feature in a single click (each method reasonable in and of itself), rather than providing one direct method (the navbar), plus an indirect method that attempts to retrain the user to click somewhere else instead.