This is so depressing. It feels like all around me every product is being enshittified to hell. I am afraid for the future and for all the good we are losing.
> 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.
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...
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.
> 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.
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)
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 useless information!
Displaying some kind of error if I focus away and the input is invalid or blank is marginally better (and I can see how in some cases might be a better choice, even), and displaying an error “on submit” (for some definition of submit) seems utterly reasonable. But before the user even has a chance to enter a valid value is just a good way to piss them off.
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.
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.
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."
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.
Apparently it is, indeed, just HTML and the likes. [0]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48048363
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.
Looks like the very top of another, secret checkbox. Mystery checkbox!
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)
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 useless information!
Displaying some kind of error if I focus away and the input is invalid or blank is marginally better (and I can see how in some cases might be a better choice, even), and displaying an error “on submit” (for some definition of submit) seems utterly reasonable. But before the user even has a chance to enter a valid value is just a good way to piss them off.
Those responsible -- all of the people -- should be promoted to digging ditches.
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.
No one cares anymore.
"Claude, rewrite all dialogs in Spectrum and create a new Photoshop release."