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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 on the team more than 15 years for a reason) and this migration is far from over for us.
These sharp edges are acknowledged, and we are working on them. Some of them are already addressed.
I know this will be of little comfort to some. But to the rest, we are still here. If you have any questions I’ll do my best to answer them.
Why were these sharp edges not discovered in UAT? It seems hard to believe that the people who make Photoshop do not use Photoshop to the degree necessary to notice these regressions. How will you avoid these kinds of problems in future updates as your transition to a modern design continues?
In a word: they were. We do use Photoshop (though not to the level or extent of most users) and noticed the regressions. Shipping software is in perennial tension between getting it perfect and getting it out the door.
Going forward, we would like them fixed, too. Personally my hope is the message from user feedback like this is heard loud and clear, and we respond appropriately.
> Why were these sharp edges not discovered in UAT?
These kinds of sharp edges should *never* have made it as far as UAT. All of these should have been caught in the first prototype and never made it beyond that point.
The fact that they made it all the way to the shipping product shows that too many responsible parties were asleep at the switch.
> It seems hard to believe that the people who make Photoshop do not use Photoshop to the degree necessary to notice these regressions.
Why? The actual people who make Photoshop are programmers, and this is a tool for image editing.
They actually have a very slick and very active beta program. I use the betas 99% of the time, and they are practically weekly updated. I'm surprised something like this wasn't reported en masse very quickly. Maybe it's just not annoying enough -- it doesn't reach the threshold for someone to file an issue. I know it's the sort of regression where I would huff and puff and get on with my day.
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.
Thank you for the constructive feedback. I agree power users are a "keystone species" and improving their workflows will benefit everyone.
Improving existing workflows without disrupting them is extremely hard to do, and often "improvement" is in the eye of the beholder. To be clear, I am not excusing issues within the application that we must fix. The team is working hard across multiple departments to gain consensus on how best to move Photoshop forward, including gathering feedback from users.
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.
Why does Camera Raw in Photoshop always open as some weird full-screen dialog box? I want it maximized, but as its a dialog it covers even the task bar, and lacks the usual window controls. If I'm doing denoise, which can take minutes, then I have to try and alt-tab the whole app into the background just to see the taskbar.
Also, for as long as I've been using Camera Raw, on every PC, the mouse lags like absolute crazy on the crop tab, to the point where I have given up using it.
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.
There is a lot of effort put in to making the application usable, no question. At the same time, we have added a litany of new features and tools since Photoshop 4, many of which I would describe as extremely technically challenging.
How many UI migrations has Photoshop gone through over the years?
Well it depends on how you define it. We have done several re-skinnings. This migration is a transition from one framework to another, which we’ve never done before. The reasons to leave the old framework lie on several axes (eng, design, product, etc.)
What was the point of this upgrade? Do you not actually use Photoshop yourself, or have people on your team that use Photoshop? Aside from the mea culpa and assurance it will be fixed, user deserve an explanation for why this basic, obvious buggy functionality wasn't discovered immediately during development? Like seriously, you should explain yourself.
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.
> 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?
Take a guess…
> 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.
> 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]
That is the upvote I wish I didn’t have to give.
Also, a fantastic rabbit hole of great websites and articles on design. Thankyou.
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.
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!
I sure hope that’s a “enable one-time purchase” tick box.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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)
No it's just the contents of the dropdown menu (master red yellow green cyan blue magenta) split out into radio buttons.
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 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.
> This seems like a failure of product management, management & executives rather than actual software craftspeople.
I’d say it’s all of them. A developer that doesn’t stop to consider that it is just absurd to validate an input box while it is still in focus is a developer that is very clearly lacking. But then again those higher up in the command chain also let it slide and actually be released.
So yeah, lots of people to blame here. Including the devs.
Ditch digging is too important for these people.
That popup when the field is emptied via backspace made me angry just to see it inflicted on a user. What the actual fuck
Yeah, that one belongs to r/badUIbattles, not production software. What the actual fuck indeed.
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.
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.
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.
You can refuse to "upgrade". Previous versions of Photoshop still work well
Holy shit. How the mighty have fallen.
This feels particularly egregious because of our unspoken assumption that Adobe, of all companies, should have "excellence in design" somewhere on its list of core guiding principles (I know, I know, hear me out). It feels like there should be someone internally at some point who says "hold on, this really goes against who we are as a company, what happened here".
It's instructive to look at how a company presents itself to the public, so I went looking at what Adobe says about itself, and what is the first instance I can find of a principle or value that this bad UX violates.
Google result:
> Adobe: Creative, marketing and document management solutions > Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences. We help our customers create, deliver and optimize content and applications.
About page:
>Changing the world through personalized digital experiences. >Adobe empowers everyone, everywhere to imagine, create, and bring any digital experience to life. From creators and students to small businesses, global enterprises, and nonprofit organizations — customers choose Adobe products to ideate, collaborate, be more productive, drive business growth, and build remarkable experiences.
>Creative Cloud >Industry-leading photography, design, illustration, and video apps that professionals rely on to do their best work.
Company values: https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2023/03/07/evolving-adobes...
>Creativity is not only what we enable for the world but it’s also core to the fabric of the company. It has driven our curiosity to look around the corner to transform the industry and ourselves. Over 40 years, we launched the desktop publishing revolution with PostScript, innovated and led every category that we are in — creativity, documents, customer experience management — to serve a wider customer universe. Create the future is all about being the customer and being relentless across all the elements that make up customer centricity to delight them, deliver unparalleled value and innovate to address unmet (and possibly unknown) needs.
>Raise the bar is about continuous evolution and never being satisfied with the status quo. It’s about never settling for good enough and always striving to be first, only and best. It’s about being intellectually honest and direct in talking about the things that aren’t going well and always looking to do better. At the end of the day, our ultimate measure of success is the customer and today more than ever, we need to surprise and delight them at every turn.
So really, the closest I could find to guiding principles being broken are tangential concepts like "remarkable experiences", "customer centricity", and "surprise and delight". Good goals for any company, but not especially design focused in my opinion.
Paraphrasing, Adobe as a company thinks of itself as a provider of technology to fuel content, marketing, and advertising money-making machines. Design at this point is incidental to who their customer happens to be.
I am sure individual employees might feel different, but as a company, we have no more reason to expect excellent UX from Adobe than, for example, Oracle or Salesforce.
Useful read for all ux designers