Adobe to Unclutter Photoshop UI 403
spotplace writes "It's not common to see a company blast their own product for failing to adapt to times and people's necessities, unless they're trying to give you a reason to buy the latest and greatest of said product. That's exactly what Adobe has done. John Nack, senior product manager at Adobe, says the old Photoshop interface doesn't cut it anymore: "I sometimes joke that looking at some parts of the app is like counting the rings in a tree: you can gauge when certain features arrived by the dimensions & style of the dialog. No one wants to work with — or work on — some shambling, bloated monster of a program.""
Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Good News (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:please don't (Score:4, Insightful)
2) We would not have a shortage of this one. But at least they could make it a notch or two better than bs, either way I'm sure the talented ones would improve also...
Re:Those design thoughts in brief (Score:4, Insightful)
Just don't change shortcuts (Score:3, Insightful)
Keyboard shortcuts? (Score:5, Insightful)
Few Photoshop profis I knew in past were telling to work effectively in Photoshop (or any other similar application for that matter), you need to learn (1st) keyboard shortcuts and (2nd) plug-ins menu.
It always seemed to me that Photoshop professionals were unfased by the clutter of its GUI.
In many aspects, Photoshop is optimized for several workflows and most newcomers work solely within one of such workflows: steep learning isn't much of problem then.
But probably do-it-all freelancers would be happy with cleaner simpler interface...
Re:Good News (Score:5, Insightful)
With respect to forcing users to switch between different modes, one of the things I find irritating about modern software UI design is that... well, that it's *designed*. Some guy (or girl or whatever) sits in a room and decides what I'm going to be doing.
In the (good) old days, there was no fancy pants GUI. You had a command line and a shell. And you chained together useful tasks through the shell. When you were in "find a file" mode, you just used "find" and piped it through some filters to do what you wanted.
My feeling is that these large applications are cluttered and bulky *because* they are designed to work in an integrated way. Instead, the functionality should be separated and the *user* should choose what they want to see and when. If the user wants a "photo touch up" mode then the user can create a mode for it and put all the "photo touch up" tools in it.
But this becomes very complicated. Asking the user to create modes from thousands of features is ridiculous. So the application shouldn't show the user anything that they don't already know how to do. When the user wants to do something new, the application should teach them how to do it, and then the functionality should be available. Before that, it's invisible. Once the user knows how to use the functionality, they should put it somewhere.
"Modes" and "known functionality" should be transportable with a configuration file that the user can take with them on a USB key. That way you can go to your mate's desk and have it work the same way it worked on your desk.
I guess the key for me is that my software should work like my kitchen. I should have the tools I want, where I want them, when I want them. I don't care how great a kitchen designer you are. My kitchen is set up how *I* want it. Maybe I'll hire you to come in and give me pointers. But I *don't* want a predesigned kitchen with tools that can only go in one place.
Back to basics? (Score:3, Insightful)
I used to use TV Paint on the Amiga, when you opened up an image it opened pretty much full screen except for a palette on the right. You could hide this with one keypress.
Professional systems in the past have had this approach, full screen canvass with a palette. Think Quantel Paintbox and the like.
An artist does not want to have to keep shifting windows around.
Long, long overdue... (Score:4, Insightful)
This has needed to happen for a very long time. Although it does mean that those of us who are professionals are probably going to have retrain to rid ourselves of the esoteric plethora of keyboard shortcuts we've had to learn to use over a long period of time.
Just one personal gripe about PS in case anyone from Adobe is reading -- why on Earth are the dialog boxes modal? When I open up a dialog box, decide that I need to move the picture underneath to see it better (since dialogue boxes are all sizes under the sun), but I can't do that can I? No, I have to close the dialog box, move the picture, and re-open the dialogue box -- that's just plain dumb!
Like most people out there, I love what I can do with Photoshop (and most other Adobe apps) but I despise the product. I would jump ship tomorrow for a better product. I don't doubt for one second that I am alone. Adobe needs serious competition. Considering the preposterous cost of their apps, and the fact that they don't make them well, I don't really understand why there's not a long list of competitors, those guys can't be the only ones who know how to code this type of application.
Re:PaintShopPro? (Score:2, Insightful)
You're not the only one - I too use good old PSP 7.04.
After many years of Amiga graphics software - still remember those days fondly - I gave PSP 6 a try and then moved to 7.04. I tried PSP 8.x, but it was getting to look too much like PhotoShop - which I always found to be a bloated, whale of a program. So PSP 7.04 it is! I can do 80-90% of what PhotoShop can do and 110% of what I need.
Long live PSP 7.x!
And to all those harden PhotoShop users who're quaking in their booties at the thought of a redesigned GUI - just stick with your current version! Just because an app gets updated doesn't mean you NEED to upgrade, particularly if it does what you need it to!
Re:Inspiration for new UI (Score:5, Insightful)
Take a note from Flash (Score:3, Insightful)
UNLIKE FLASH MX.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Back to basics? (Score:1, Insightful)
I read the article and have mixed feelings about this. Ever since Adobe bent to the Windows model and stuck that omnipresent, non-optional [DELETED} options bar duo-menu in 7.0 (even if it did eventually become optional in later versions) the thought of them performing a total re-tooling of the UI brings a faint feeling of dread to me. Uniformity, clarity and shortcuts, even a completely different scheme, might be nice, but I've witnessed too many applications spruce up the interface into a stylish waster of time and uniform bringer of confusion, all forced to fit the author's individual vision of usefulness rather than the user's.
As for TV Paint for the Amiga: I take it you're still using that? {p.s. if you ever do finally use Photoshop, try hitting 'tab')
If I didn't need it for work... (Score:4, Insightful)
I've always found Adobe's programs useful, but for some reason I've found their interfaces to be counterintuitive, messy time-wasters. PhotoShop is just the worst of a truly horrible bunch in that respect. I absolutely love what you can do with images in PhotoShop, but I can't count the number of times I've had to get up and walk away from the computer in a rage because something that should be dead-simple is buried where no sane person would look for it.
I can't wait to see what the re-design looks like. I only wish to hell they'd asked me first. Not that I'm a world-class expert, it's just that I have a feeling some guy from Adobe sneaks in every so often and has Audition or PhotoShop or Acrobat report on how I use them just so the next version can piss me off all over again.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good News (Score:5, Insightful)
MS Office does this, with menus that hide unused menu options.
It is THE WORST innovation in UI design that I can think of, off the top of my head.
The user wants consistancy more than anything else. The UI should not evolve or change with the user because invariably, the developer will change it in ways the user doesn't expect.
Re:Inspiration for new UI (Score:2, Insightful)
Top 2 reasons I do not use Photoshop (Score:2, Insightful)
#1 The zooming with the scrollwheel does not work as I expect it to and I have not seen any options to customize it to my needs.
Those two reasons alone keep me from using it and staying with Paint Shop Pro.
Sounds like an excuse (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Inspiration for new UI (Score:5, Insightful)
The purpose of GIMPshop was to "replicate the feel of Adobe Photoshop". Well, Adobe just told you themselves that the Photoshop UI sucks. So, clearly, redesigning Gimp to be more Photoshop-like would not have been a good way of improving it.
I don't say that GIMP should orientate on Adobe Photoshop. But at least it should also do a complete redesign of the GUI.
Phrases like "a complete redesign" generally just indicate that people have no idea what's wrong or how to fix it; they are not helpful. In fact, I see no indication that the Gimp needs a "complete redesign". What it needs is dockable palettes and better multi-window handling. If you can identify other *specific* problem areas, please do so; but comments about "complete redesign" are bullshit.
I think what most Photoshop users don't like about the Gimp really is that the menu entries and shortcuts are so different from Photoshop so that they can't find anything. Well, tough. The Gimp menu structure is no worse than the Photoshop one, and Gimp users are used to it. At least the shortcuts are much easier to change on the Gimp than in Photoshop.
Re:Inspiration for new UI (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Just don't change shortcuts (Score:2, Insightful)
MOD PARENT TROLL (Score:2, Insightful)
I just loaded up the GIMP, made a new image, clicked on the brush icon and changed the brush size. You know... the one that was right fucking in front of me on the default menu. I know most of that other garbage in your post is not in the gimp, but we've heard that same old shit so often before I think every slashdot user could tell you now that the GIMP doesn't have CMYK or have a whole bunch of filters that like one or two graphic designers actually use and no one else never needs. "Teh gimp suxors" posts are getting really old so just drop it please. And I am so sick of some photoshop fan boys coming around here constantly bashing GIMP because it's not an exact duplicate of their precious little jewel photoshop. Don't like the GIMP, I have a real simple answer for you: DON'T USE IT.
Incidentally, I find it delightfully ironic that every GIMP article some photoshop fan boys come out saying the that gui on the GIMP needs to be more like photoshop. Well, here's mud in your eye -- the ui on photoshop isn't perfect either. Hell, I've known that ever since I started using photoshop. Maybe you're just too indoctrinated in the Adobe way to notice any more.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Inspiration for new UI (Score:1, Insightful)
Linux WMs are OK, although in both Gnome and KDE you end up with a lot of useless entries in the window switcher, when you really only need one per document. The Gimp is fine on Linux, but not nearly as good as it can be on Mac OS X.
Windows' WM is an abomination - it does absolutely nothing, leaving the entire burden of managing windows with either the user, or the application developer. It's "optimized" for having one single program open at once, taking up the entire screen.
Second, the single window approach is terrible. It completely screws up multiple monitors by restricting the app to a single monitor, and prevents you from actually using more than one program at a time.
Re:Inspiration for new UI (Score:3, Insightful)
Trying to distill down the Adobe blog post to "they said their UI sucks" is at worst childish and at most a gross misinterpretation of what was said. Adobe has admitted to evaluating their program, it's features, how it's used, and how they can work to make the underlying features of the program more accessible within different workflows. This is something the GIMP developers have been asked to do for years. Yet, all they've ever shown is a lack of desire to adapt or a stubborn disregard of any constructive criticism that has been offered.
Adobe Notes or, (write the) Help Yourself (Score:3, Insightful)
Here's a practical example. Let's say you go into Photoshop's Unsharp Mask dialog box. "Amount" is straightforward, but what the hell do "Radius" and "Threshold" mean, exactly?
I don't know, but you know what should be able to tell me? The help system.
Re:Good News (Score:3, Insightful)
While I can certainly understand why you might want to work that way yourself, I think there might be a few practical difficulties with applying your reasoning more generally.
For one thing, you mentioned effectively training the user on demand when they need to do new things, but both before-the-fact training and after-the-fact on-line help or support calls work much better if the context is consistent. I notice that the Microsoft Office team — who, for all their sins, are pretty careful about their user interface and actively collect feedback — have moved in exactly the opposite direction. The magic hiding menus feature was pretty much universally slammed, and with Office 2007 they've gone for something much less customisable than before. And despite the bitching on Slashdot because they're Microsoft and they changed something, I've yet to meet someone in the real world who didn't say they preferred the new version after a little time getting used to it.
A related point is that for all the UI customisability in many modern applications, almost no-one actually uses it. Simple things like setting up styles and templates in word processors or presentation packages are ignored in favour of ad-hoc formatting. Personally, I think this has a lot to do with the fact that UIs make it easier to just click the big, bold B than to go through several steps to create a style called "strong emphasis" and ultimately... click a big, bold B to define what that style means. This doesn't mean that styles aren't much more powerful. It doesn't mean the facility isn't important: try finding any large business that doesn't require some Marketing-designed official company template be used to give a consistent look to their slideshows! But it does illustrate that a typical user today prefers simple tools they can readily understand to more powerful tools they have to configure first. It would be a brave company that designed a user interface against that principle. They might become a spectacularly successful company if they got it right, but they'd still be brave to try!
For what it's worth, I think the hardest point of designing a user interface for any widely used application is balancing the learning curve with ease of use for power users. You can make everything use hand-holding wizards and one-step commands, but that gets in the way of experienced users who already know they want a certain combination of effects without spelling them out every time. On the other hand, even if something is easy to use and much more powerful once it's been configured the first time, requiring that configuration step can be a big hurdle for the novice. I've always thought the ideal approach would be to have the powerful underlying model based on configuration, and then to make the hand-holding stuff for new users just a front-end that leads naturally into doing everything the more powerful way, so as users gain experience it becomes the normal way to do things without there being some specific point when you switch from "novice" to "power user". Of course, I don't get to design user interfaces for products that make half my company's entire revenue stream and have hundreds of millions of users so I'm a little unqualified to comment on the practicality of this theory. :-)
Re:Inspiration for new UI (Score:5, Insightful)
Tough? There are a lot more people using programs like Photoshop than using GIMP. If the goal is to have them switch, you have to address their needs. GIMP is not successful because it's a superior product, it's "successful" because it's free, and people are willing to make sacrifices to save money (and yes, I'm sure there are five people who'd love to point out that they switched because they think GIMP is better, but that's hardly helpful). GIMP will be surpassed by a more user-friendly program if the attitude is "we have all the users we want". Unlike Firefox, which was always commended for its ease of use, GIMP has long been criticized for its interface (even by its own users). Oh, and for the record, I hate Photoshop's interface as much as I hate GIMP's (I'm a long-time Paint Shop Pro user).
Re:Good (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Inspiration for new UI (Score:2, Insightful)
That's what window managers are for.
Re:Inspiration for new UI (Score:4, Insightful)
Gimp and Photoshop should both take a look at Paint.net It is open source and should be ported to other OSes. It is by far the best photo editor for the novice to prosumer. I can do most things I commonly need to do professionally with it. Even though it isn't a replacement for photoshop yet, I can see how it could be in the future.
Sure, it has some problems of its own, but comparing the development time, the Gimp Developers should be ashamed of themselves and the Photoshop folks should be retired by now.
Your soon to be -5 Friend,
Datapharmer
Re:Good News (Score:3, Insightful)
"By leading people to best practices, we can start deprecating (and later removing) outmoded functionality."
I totally HATE when apps do that. It's exactly like you say about mutating menus -- what they hide or remove is invariably something I use every day, but now have to either dumbster-dive** for, or find a workaround to replace. This is one major reason why I've become very reluctant to upgrade my major apps.
** "Dumbster-dive": having to root around in the bowels of the UI to find the necessities they've hidden from us in the name of dumbing it down for their notion of "typical" users. Here's a clue, folks -- some apps, and I suspect Photoshop is one of them, have NO "typical" users, because everyone uses it for slightly different jobs, along different workflow paths. And some users do so many different things that they have NO "typical" workflow, so no matter how the menus mutate, they will ALWAYS be wrong for the use of the moment.
(This is why one of the first things I do with WinXP is turn off the fucking "customized start menu" shit!)
Re:Good (Score:1, Insightful)
But yes, they've changed the UI. They've made it even WORSE.