Photoshop's challenges with focus, pt. 2

> 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.

> 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.

I 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.

> "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!

Not 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)

I've been too scared to buy anything from Adobe anyways, because I'm worried I can't get rid of them.

What 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.

The popup modal is one of the worst things I have ever seen. It's like they are trying to parody bad UI design.

There'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."

I'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.

That popup when the field is emptied via backspace made me angry just to see it inflicted on a user. What the actual fuck

Useful read for all ux designers

Holy shit. How the mighty have fallen.