Two things I can tell you: the engineering team does care about Photoshop (I’ve been on the team more than 15 years for a reason) and this migration is far from over for us.
These sharp edges are acknowledged, and we are working on them. Some of them are already addressed.
I know this will be of little comfort to some. But to the rest, we are still here. If you have any questions I’ll do my best to answer them.
Going forward, we would like them fixed, too. Personally my hope is the message from user feedback like this is heard loud and clear, and we respond appropriately.
First do no harm. Changing functionality that works is not in tension with getting regressions out the door. Assure it is working before shipping by hiring testers that use the product to the level or extent of most users.
> We do use Photoshop (though not to the level or extent of most users) and noticed the regressions.
Is there something you want to tell us about management? This is crazy, if what you mean is you know you broke this for power users but shipped it anyways, or that you don't have power-users on payroll to constantly test your product that you can call "part of the team".
Indeed, I don't think most people can appreciate how hard the tension is between shipping and perfection. As a fellow perfectionist, it kills me to ship things that I know aren't perfect, but I've had to work on becoming more of a pragmatist because if I had my perfectionist way, shipping would take years and feedback loops would be so long that it would be somewhat self defeating (though that's a personal problem). I appreciate you taking the time to respond here, even knowing you'll catch some heat.
Photoshop is the premiere image editor that has been in existence for decades. The issues you are responding to are fundamental changes to how the application behaves. It defies belief that your team and its processes have this little respect for dedicated users who have spent thousands of dollars on your product over the course of years. I understand shipping software. Do you understand your users?
These kinds of sharp edges should *never* have made it as far as UAT. All of these should have been caught in the first prototype and never made it beyond that point.
The fact that they made it all the way to the shipping product shows that too many responsible parties were asleep at the switch.
Why? The actual people who make Photoshop are programmers, and this is a tool for image editing.
Obviously they should have a few power users on payroll that find these obvious regressions quickly, and we can call them part of the team who make Photoshop. I'm not sure why this, and what the lead scientist said is valid justification. Just hire "people that use Photoshop". If they already do this, then the people that make Photoshop use Photoshop to a sufficient degree.
But moreover, if one has developed Photoshop for 15 years, I'm pretty sure they are aware of power user table-stakes features.
And then one more point:
> Why?
Because that's what it takes to develop high quality software tools. This shouldn't even be up for debate when charging money for software.
I think a nice outcome of this would be if Adobe recognized how much these things matter to power users, and that it’s possible to improve existing workflows without disrupting them, and without just adding something new that sits awkwardly side by side with the existing features. Maybe rather than fixing the issues that were introduced, you could aim for something that is thoroughly better, as you need to work through everything anyway.
Improving existing workflows without disrupting them is extremely hard to do, and often "improvement" is in the eye of the beholder. To be clear, I am not excusing issues within the application that we must fix. The team is working hard across multiple departments to gain consensus on how best to move Photoshop forward, including gathering feedback from users.
I find it hard to believe that the team is “working hard” to gain consensus on how best to move forward when such simple things make it to production.
Does anyone at Adobe ACTUALLY use Photoshop? Didn’t anyone stop for a moment to think that shipping in such a taste was a terrible idea?
I keep seeing the same issue over and over again with other companies as well. “Sorry you are disappointed but our internal processes, or we had to do this because of deadlines, yadda yadda, blah blah.”
Does anyone stop and think why they are developing or shipping a product? Its not for you to have an overly complicated development, build, or review process. It’s not for you to hit your quota of installed upgrades or versions shipped per quarter. It’s for people to use your product. Your product has utility, and the customer is your client, not the other way around.
Also, for as long as I've been using Camera Raw, on every PC, the mouse lags like absolute crazy on the crop tab, to the point where I have given up using it.
I’m sure not looking forwards to it, there’s stuff that was “redesigned” the last time this happened a decade or so back that’s still the absolute shittiest thing that works and hasn’t changed at all from then.
Take a guess…
This is key to being a product manager, as well as a UX designer. It is the single most important lesson to learn for anyone managing stable, longterm software.
I used to be the PM for the Delphi IDE (RAD Studio, C++Builder) and we did a UX refresh. The software needed it, it wasn't arbitrary (there is an old product management joke: if you don't know what to do, do a UX refresh. Same as a CEO: don't know what to do, do an acquisition.) But it was needed, and IMO we did a good job.
This specific view -- that people use our software eight hours a day and we need to respect that through retaining expected behaviour, not arbitrarily moving things, and so much more -- was the guiding principle through that work. Toolbars stayed with the same contents; when settings pages were reorganised, it was with thought and care and we communicated why so that people would understand; UI was more adjusted than redone.
It was not perfect work, but it was done with an attitude of respect for users, and an attitude of minimising surprise. I hope and believe that was visible.
None of it lost functionality like this, which looks like they used an entirely new UI framework under the hood. I wouldn't be surprised to hear Photoshop was using some web renderer these days to render their UI.
Apparently it is, indeed, just HTML and the likes. [0]
Also, a fantastic rabbit hole of great websites and articles on design. Thankyou.
I feel like I started registering this same thing around the time JS developers started rebuilding every manner of form control in the browser. A text input isn’t fancy enough, it needs to be inside several divs with custom event handling for mouse in, mouse out, keypress etc. but it’s always half baked.
Like it’s actively frustrating to focus a field like a phone number entry and already the field is red and says something like “must be a valid phone number”. Yes I know that! I’m trying to enter one! Stop drawing my attention to useless information!
Displaying some kind of error if I focus away and the input is invalid or blank is marginally better (and I can see how in some cases might be a better choice, even), and displaying an error “on submit” (for some definition of submit) seems utterly reasonable. But before the user even has a chance to enter a valid value is just a good way to piss them off.
Start to type a phone number. Press the first digit. Get a popup: “please enter a valid phone number”. Dismiss is. Type the second digit. Repeat the dialog. Get frustrated and type the number into a different window, copy it, and paste it into the phone number field. The field is still marked invalid. Press backspace. Get the invalid number popup. Type the digit. Voila, the UI updates to congratulate you for being smart enough to type an entire phone number.
Those UIs were written by someone who’s never actually used a computer.
Looks like the very top of another, secret checkbox. Mystery checkbox!
This looks like it would require deeper changes to a user's workflow.
(Of course the missing focus/tab functionality does the same in breaking keyboard-driven workflows that worked before)
If the change for the "before/after" color bars only removes the gray space between the bars, I think this is an improvement. Found it surprisingly hard to determine if the color bars are identical with that space inbetween. Maybe there is some unintended optical illusion at play.
Those responsible -- all of the people -- should be promoted to digging ditches.
I’d say it’s all of them. A developer that doesn’t stop to consider that it is just absurd to validate an input box while it is still in focus is a developer that is very clearly lacking. But then again those higher up in the command chain also let it slide and actually be released.
So yeah, lots of people to blame here. Including the devs.
In a multi-display macOS setup, do you think my layout is ever remembered? Nope. If I save a layout preset, and then try to use that, do you think that works? Nope. If forced to stake my life on being able to position or use palettes in a predictable way, I'd be long gone.
One pet peeve related to a mention on the page is when you typo an alphabetical character into a dimension, Photoshop steals focus with an "Invalid numeric entry" popup. Just strip it and leave it at that. Stealing focus is a high crime, IMO.
No one cares anymore.
"Claude, rewrite all dialogs in Spectrum and create a new Photoshop release."
It's instructive to look at how a company presents itself to the public, so I went looking at what Adobe says about itself, and what is the first instance I can find of a principle or value that this bad UX violates.
Google result:
> Adobe: Creative, marketing and document management solutions > Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences. We help our customers create, deliver and optimize content and applications.
About page:
>Changing the world through personalized digital experiences. >Adobe empowers everyone, everywhere to imagine, create, and bring any digital experience to life. From creators and students to small businesses, global enterprises, and nonprofit organizations — customers choose Adobe products to ideate, collaborate, be more productive, drive business growth, and build remarkable experiences.
>Creative Cloud >Industry-leading photography, design, illustration, and video apps that professionals rely on to do their best work.
Company values: https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2023/03/07/evolving-adobes...
>Creativity is not only what we enable for the world but it’s also core to the fabric of the company. It has driven our curiosity to look around the corner to transform the industry and ourselves. Over 40 years, we launched the desktop publishing revolution with PostScript, innovated and led every category that we are in — creativity, documents, customer experience management — to serve a wider customer universe. Create the future is all about being the customer and being relentless across all the elements that make up customer centricity to delight them, deliver unparalleled value and innovate to address unmet (and possibly unknown) needs.
>Raise the bar is about continuous evolution and never being satisfied with the status quo. It’s about never settling for good enough and always striving to be first, only and best. It’s about being intellectually honest and direct in talking about the things that aren’t going well and always looking to do better. At the end of the day, our ultimate measure of success is the customer and today more than ever, we need to surprise and delight them at every turn.
So really, the closest I could find to guiding principles being broken are tangential concepts like "remarkable experiences", "customer centricity", and "surprise and delight". Good goals for any company, but not especially design focused in my opinion.
Paraphrasing, Adobe as a company thinks of itself as a provider of technology to fuel content, marketing, and advertising money-making machines. Design at this point is incidental to who their customer happens to be.
I am sure individual employees might feel different, but as a company, we have no more reason to expect excellent UX from Adobe than, for example, Oracle or Salesforce.
