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Photoshop's challenges with focus, pt. 2

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

#41

Post by jacobolus »

ManuelKiessling wrote: post #37
MontagFTB wrote: post #24

Hey all- I am Foster Brereton and Principal Scientist for this UI effort. Suffice it to say, the article and this thread have had their impact on the people behind the software. We are aware we got a lot of things wrong. As the primary technical lead on the UI migration, a lot of the implementation details ultimately fall up to me. Two things I can tell you: the engineering team does care about Photoshop (I’ve been o…

This is only a tangential question, but anyway: I‘ve read several years ago that since around Photoshop version 4, 99% of the work is about keeping the application UI usable with all these new features, and not about „hard“ technical challenges within the features themselves. Is that true?

That sounds plausible. Most of the features are kind of gimmicky bolt-ons added piecemeal and not really integrated with each-other. They make for cool 10-second demos but then most users ignore them because they aren't part of a coherent system. The result is a menu after menu of gimmicks, like a cabinet of hyper-specialized kitchen tools bought from infomercials. There has been limited product vision about the core abstractions and their basic composability. If you give a skilled user a photoshop version from the early 2000s they'll largely be able to do what they need, because there hasn't really been much fundamental innovative improvement in the past ~25 years.

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

#42

Post by Neywiny »

freedomben wrote: post #40
Neywiny wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So just to confirm, Photoshop is willing to ship regressed products to paying customers and views that as preferable to just not doing that?

I'm far from an adobe fan, but I feel the need to defend them just a little here. Everyone with non-trivial software has to do this to some extent. Perfection just isn't possible. The real measure is in where the company finds the balance. I think Adobe needs to tilt toward the perfection a bit more, but this is not something that people can do unilaterally without buy in from the very top of the chain, which I'm gue…

They said they were principal scientist for this change and voluntarily took partial responsibility. I think if you look at this in a greater context of things were perfectly fine for decades and then they broke then I'm not sure how it's at all defensible. Just looking at the old vs new modals, there aren't even really new features. It's just breaking it

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

#43

Post by kstrauser »

DoneWithAllThat wrote: post #22
Jtarii wrote: post #16

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

The whole pattern of considering an input field being blank or having an invalid value while still focused causing an error indicator of any kind to appear is surprisingly infuriating to me. 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…

Well, if we’re venting: I want to scream at UIs that to validation on fixed-length fields when you type — not paste, type — the last character.

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.

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

#44

Post by notglossy »

MontagFTB wrote: post #24

Hey all- I am Foster Brereton and Principal Scientist for this UI effort. Suffice it to say, the article and this thread have had their impact on the people behind the software. We are aware we got a lot of things wrong. As the primary technical lead on the UI migration, a lot of the implementation details ultimately fall up to me. Two things I can tell you: the engineering team does care about Photoshop (I’ve been o…

With all due respect, the customer doesn’t care. You served a raw turkey on Thanksgiving and act like there is nothing that could be done to remedy this. Under no circumstances was leaving it in the oven longer an option for some reason. You knew it was raw, so why did you serve it?

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.

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

#45

Post by tobr »

MontagFTB wrote: post #24

Hey all- I am Foster Brereton and Principal Scientist for this UI effort. Suffice it to say, the article and this thread have had their impact on the people behind the software. We are aware we got a lot of things wrong. As the primary technical lead on the UI migration, a lot of the implementation details ultimately fall up to me. Two things I can tell you: the engineering team does care about Photoshop (I’ve been o…

Kudos for engaging! It’s been a while since I used Photoshop on a daily basis, but my impression was always that the UI felt a bit stuck in time. Like no one had thought about how to make little things in the UI better in a way that improves daily work. You’d see new ideas crammed in on top, but very little refinement of what was already there. (Is the ”Wind” filter still only possible to apply left or right, not up or down?)

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.

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

#46

Post by egypturnash »

MontagFTB wrote: post #24

Hey all- I am Foster Brereton and Principal Scientist for this UI effort. Suffice it to say, the article and this thread have had their impact on the people behind the software. We are aware we got a lot of things wrong. As the primary technical lead on the UI migration, a lot of the implementation details ultimately fall up to me. Two things I can tell you: the engineering team does care about Photoshop (I’ve been o…

I’m an artist who spends most of her time in Illustrator. Should I be expecting a UI rework to this “Spectrum Design Language” too, or is that team’s obsession with AI garbage going to take precedent?

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.

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

#47

Post by ndiddy »

jacobolus wrote: post #41
ManuelKiessling wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is only a tangential question, but anyway: I‘ve read several years ago that since around Photoshop version 4, 99% of the work is about keeping the application UI usable with all these new features, and not about „hard“ technical challenges within the features themselves. Is that true?

That sounds plausible. Most of the features are kind of gimmicky bolt-ons added piecemeal and not really integrated with each-other. They make for cool 10-second demos but then most users ignore them because they aren't part of a coherent system. The result is a menu after menu of gimmicks, like a cabinet of hyper-specialized kitchen tools bought from infomercials. There has been limited product vision about the core…

Microsoft actually does a fairly good job with this. Here's a part of a talk that goes over a single feature in PowerPoint (a slide animation that morphs the contents of one slide into a different slide) and demonstrates how this feature interacts with the enormous existing PowerPoint feature set in interesting ways. https://youtu.be/_3loq22TxSc?t=1409 It's obviously a stupid gimmicky feature but whatever team Microsoft put on it were clearly overachievers.

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

#49

Post by pkcoskfiwjfj »

Adobe’s too busy trying to come up with ways to trap paying customers while riding the AI wave to care.

Every single one of its apps is a mess, currently. Their UIs are wildly different even when doing similar or identical things. Icons for equal functions differ between apps. Keyboard shortcuts that should be global, or at least the same between apps, are wildly different as well. Apps consume so much RAM when doing basically nothing it’s actually ridiculous.

Adobe is a complete mess.

It’s even funnier to see the “Principal Scientist for this UI effort” show up here, and with all due respect to them: someone’s not doing their job right over there. No one cares how many UI scientists, researchers or engineers you have if what you ship to PAYING customers of your VERY expensive piece of software is unfinished, barely thought out, untested crap.

Fix it. And fix it properly.

This “modern UI” of yours has absolutely nothing modern, updated or visibly useful in it. It was clearly made just so your AI functions could be better integrated into the existing UI, but rounding a few sliders and making hue strips thicker a modern UI does not make.

Just freaking fix it.

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

#50

Post by tristor »

This is so obviously a "modernization" effort that means they swapped out the existing UI engine with a UI engine built on web frameworks under the hood and tried to match things as closely as possible visually with some designer-induced changes, but without actually thinking about interactions at all. Unfortunately so much of "modernization" in desktop software these days comes down to ruining it with web bullshit. Backend Javascript might go down in history as the biggest technology mistake to ever exist.
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