Photoshop's challenges with focus, pt. 2
- vintagedave - 7994 sekunder sedan> It’s not that hard to picture people spending 8+ hours a day going through these windows for years if not decades to come, and it’s not hard to add and multiply all...
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.
- eloisius - 1685 sekunder sedan> Discrepancies between hover and focus handling are a horrible new thing I’m starting to see more in recent interfaces
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.
- northernsausage - 13231 sekunder sedanI use PS every single day and I can't tell you how frustrating the select and mask tool is to actually use. I've rolled back to 2020 version that seems to be easier to use but dumber product.
- voidUpdate - 15487 sekunder sedan> "What is that weird clump of pixels on the left of the bottom edge!?"
Looks like the very top of another, secret checkbox. Mystery checkbox!
- xg15 - 13070 sekunder sedanNot a Photoshop user, so I may be misinterpreting that, but doesn't this outright remove some functionality from the hue/saturation panel? That "global colors" dropdown seems to be gone and the two "before/after" color bars were somehow merged into one.
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)
- vardump - 10162 sekunder sedanI've been too scared to buy anything from Adobe anyways, because I'm worried I can't get rid of them.
- twhitmore - 8266 sekunder sedanWhat an incompetence & embarrassment. This seems like a failure of product management, management & executives rather than actual software craftspeople.
Those responsible -- all of the people -- should be promoted to digging ditches.
- Jtarii - 4374 sekunder sedanThe popup modal is one of the worst things I have ever seen. It's like they are trying to parody bad UI design.
- Traubenfuchs - 1671 sekunder sedanThere's apparently no one left at Adobe in the whole software engineering chain from business person, over to ux/ui designer, over to dev, to QA to detect something like this. Do they even still employ ux/ui designers? User testing? No? Anyone home?
No one cares anymore.
"Claude, rewrite all dialogs in Spectrum and create a new Photoshop release."
- prawn - 3615 sekunder sedanI've used Photoshop for about 30 years. For a fair early portion of that, I absolutely enjoyed using it. It was easily my favourite piece of software, and I remember one week in particular after Photoshop 3.0 was released, dreaming in layers. For a fair while though now, I've resented the baffling interface changes and the pricing model.
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.
- cwillu - 7945 sekunder sedanThat popup when the field is emptied via backspace made me angry just to see it inflicted on a user. What the actual fuck
- abstractspoon - 188136 sekunder sedanUseful read for all ux designers
- meindnoch - 5479 sekunder sedanHoly shit. How the mighty have fallen.
Nördnytt! 🤓