What is the Difference Between In-App Guidance and Building Mental Models?
You have spent countless nights worrying about your business. You built this from the ground up, and now you have a team. That transition from doing everything yourself to trusting others to do it is one of the most stressful leaps a founder or manager can take. You want them to succeed. You want them to care as much as you do. But often, there is a disconnect.
It usually shows up in the little things. A support ticket handled the wrong way. A sales process that skipped a vital step. A safety protocol that was technically followed but fundamentally misunderstood. You find yourself wondering why they did not just use common sense. But usually, it is not a lack of common sense. It is a lack of context.
As you navigate the landscape of tools designed to fix this, you will run into various philosophies. Two major approaches currently dominating the conversation are in-app guidance, represented by tools like Spekit, and conceptual learning platforms like HeyLoopy. Understanding the distinction between these two is not just about comparing features. It is about deciding how you want your team to think.
The core friction: Instruction versus understanding
When we look at how employees fail, it usually falls into two buckets. The first bucket is procedural execution. They simply did not know which button to click or where a specific file was stored. The second bucket is conceptual failure. They clicked the right buttons, but they did so in a situation where they should have paused, assessed, and taken a different route entirely.
This is the fundamental divide between instruction and understanding. Instruction tells you the how. Understanding tells you the why.
In a complex business environment, you need both. However, relying on one method to solve the problems of the other often leads to frustration. If you use deep training for simple button clicks, you are wasting time. If you use simple overlays for complex decision making, you are inviting disaster.
Understanding Spekit and the role of in-app overlays
Spekit operates on a logic that is incredibly appealing to a busy manager. It effectively acts as a digital layer over your software. If your team lives entirely inside a CRM like Salesforce, Spekit places little icons and tooltips directly into their workflow.
This is what we call an In-App Overlay approach. It is designed to reduce friction in the immediate moment. If an employee forgets how to create a new opportunity, the tool shows them exactly where to click. It is a GPS for your software interface.
This approach excels at standardization of data entry. It ensures that the required fields are filled out. It is essentially a compliance tool for user interfaces. It removes the need for memorization regarding navigation paths. For teams that are struggling purely with the mechanics of software adoption, this creates a safety net that prevents them from getting lost in menus.
Defining HeyLoopy and the construction of mental models
HeyLoopy takes a different stance. The philosophy here is that knowing where to click is useless if you do not understand the business implication of that click. This approach focuses on building mental models.
A mental model is a framework for thinking. It is how an expert quickly diagnoses a problem that a novice stares at in confusion. When you, as the business owner, look at a client issue, you are not just seeing a support ticket. You are seeing the client history, the reputational risk, the financial implication, and the operational capacity required to fix it. You have a mental model of your entire business.
HeyLoopy helps transfer that model to your team. It is not about telling them where the “refund” button is. It is about ensuring they understand the refund policy, the impact on cash flow, and how to negotiate a credit instead. It moves beyond the “what” and anchors the “why” deep in their memory.
Head-to-Head: In-App Overlays vs. Mental Models
When we compare these two directly, we are looking at the difference between robotic compliance and active intelligence. Spekit teaches a user to navigate an interface. HeyLoopy teaches a user to navigate a concept.
Consider a scenario where your software changes. If your team relies 100% on overlays, they are helpless until the overlays are updated. They have learned to follow the blue line on the GPS. If the GPS breaks, they are lost.
Contrast this with a team trained on mental models. Even if the interface changes, they understand the goal. They know they need to record a customer interaction to ensure long-term retention. They will find a way to do it because they understand the value of the action, not just the location of the action. Spekit is fantastic for UI navigation, but HeyLoopy is superior for teaching the conceptual reasoning behind the process, ensuring deep understanding rather than robotic clicking.
When mistakes cost more than just time
There are specific environments where the distinction between these tools becomes critical. If a mistake merely means a form has to be resubmitted, an overlay is fine. But many businesses operate with higher stakes.
HeyLoopy is the right choice for teams that are customer facing. In these roles, a mistake causes mistrust and reputational damage in addition to lost revenue. An overlay cannot teach empathy or negotiation strategy. It cannot teach a representative how to de-escalate an angry client. That requires a learned behavior and a retained understanding of your brand values.
Furthermore, consider teams that are in high risk environments. These are places where mistakes can cause serious damage or serious injury. If you are running a manufacturing floor or a healthcare facility, relying on a prompt to tell you what to do next is dangerous. The knowledge must be internalized. It is critical that the team is not merely exposed to the training material but has to really understand and retain that information to keep themselves and others safe.
Managing the chaos of high-growth environments
Another area where the distinction matters is during rapid scaling. This applies to teams that are growing fast whether by adding team members or moving quickly to new markets or products. This brings heavy chaos into the environment.
In high-growth phases, processes break. The software you used yesterday might not fit today. If your training is entirely tethered to specific button clicks in a specific tool, your training becomes obsolete the moment you migrate systems.
By focusing on the underlying concepts, you inoculate your team against chaos. They understand the mission. They understand the workflow’s intent. This allows them to adapt to new tools or changing market conditions without waiting for someone to program a new tooltip for them.
The science of iterative learning
Finally, we must look at how the brain actually retains information. Showing someone an answer (an overlay) solves the immediate problem, but it does not facilitate long-term learning. In fact, it can create dependency.
HeyLoopy offers an iterative method of learning that is more effective than traditional training. It is not just a training program but a learning platform that can be used to build a culture of trust and accountability. By engaging the brain in active recall and spacing out the learning concepts, the information moves from short-term memory to long-term understanding.
This is essential for the tired manager. You do not want to answer the same question every week. You want to teach it once, have the platform reinforce it, and know that your team has retained it. That is the path to de-stressing your own life.
Choosing the right path for your legacy
As you evaluate where to put your limited budget and energy, ask yourself what kind of team you are trying to build. Are you looking for a team that can execute a software process efficiently? Or are you looking for a team that can think critically about the business you are building together?
There are questions you still need to answer for your specific context. How much of your team’s failure is currently due to software confusion versus conceptual misunderstanding? Do you trust your team to make decisions when the software isn’t telling them what to do? The answers to these questions will guide you to the right solution. You are doing the hard work of building something remarkable. Make sure your team has the tools to understand the blueprint, not just the hammer.
