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Photoshop's challenges with focus, pt. 2

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Re: Photoshop's challenges with focus, pt. 2

#11

Post by bondarchuk »

xg15 wrote: post #5

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 workflo…

No it's just the contents of the dropdown menu (master red yellow green cyan blue magenta) split out into radio buttons.

Re: Photoshop's challenges with focus, pt. 2

#13

Post by rob74 »

vintagedave wrote: post #8

> 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.…

I was a heavy user of Delphi from when it first appeared in the 1990s until 2010, and I can't remember ever being annoyed by a UX change across all the versions I used over all those years, so thanks for your efforts! I guess this is one of those things that you only notice when someone doesn't respect it, like in this case (or Microsoft feeling obligated to do a UX refresh for the bundled applications with every new Windows version), but when you notice it, it annoys you even more...

Re: Photoshop's challenges with focus, pt. 2

#15

Post by prawn »

twhitmore wrote: post #7

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.

Ditch digging is too important for these people.

Re: Photoshop's challenges with focus, pt. 2

#17

Post by prawn »

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.

Re: Photoshop's challenges with focus, pt. 2

#18

Post by eloisius »

> 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.

Re: Photoshop's challenges with focus, pt. 2

#19

Post by Traubenfuchs »

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."

Re: Photoshop's challenges with focus, pt. 2

#20

Post by vintagedave »

rob74 wrote: post #13
vintagedave wrote: post #8

> 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.…

I was a heavy user of Delphi from when it first appeared in the 1990s until 2010, and I can't remember ever being annoyed by a UX change across all the versions I used over all those years, so thanks for your efforts! I guess this is one of those things that you only notice when someone doesn't respect it, like in this case (or Microsoft feeling obligated to do a UX refresh for the bundled applications with every new…

That was before my time, so I am the wrong person to thank! :) But I am in weekly contact with at least one PM overlapping that time so I will pass that on. Kinds words, I appreciate it.
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