Photoshop CC 2015.1: New user interface lacks contrast and many usability cues, lots of other problems

Hi Fellow Frustrated Photoshop Users,

I chatted with tech support and got this link, telling how to download previous versions from the CC desktop app.

Scroll down to #5
https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-clou...

I want to also thank David for giving us some insight into the development issues and results. After reading his post, it occurs to me that what were experiencing is Adobe's business problem and the fact that also they 'listen to their customers', theyre decisions are Adobe centric and not user or pro-user centric.

The recent carving out of a new user UI that is Adobe based is the first example of how Adobe has decided to act as a third rail between two major OS systems, I saw it creep into Acrobat Pro, and that product has become very frustrating to deal with especially when it comes to interacting with the Mac OS. Multiple steps are needs to open and save documents now, wheras before, it was tightly integrated with Apple's GUI standards.

Secondly, we can see Adobe in general, just ignoring the voices in the forum thread, and they've been growing for some time. The appearance of programs like Pixemator and Affinity are a testament to a desire for what Adobe programs excelled at, and they are surpassing Adobe in terms of customer interaction and developing features and add-ons that INTEGRATE with OS advantages, not compete with them.

Lastly, I'll simply address the business itself. Adobe has excellent , mature products that need constant attention to comply and work flawlessly with OS changes. However, they seem to have taken a posture to decided that they will innovate and make integration decisions regardless of their impact on the community. This I believe is their own acknowledgement that they really have little new to offer that isn't in the mobile app space and an acknowledgement that their internal teams 'need to innovate for the sake of innovation' versus innovate to actually solve a problem or fulfill a need.

Affinity just came out with 6 plugins for OS X Photos integration. Now there's a need that is being solved. Are you on the ground, Adobe or more comfortable in the corporate fortress?

All true, Andrew. While we're at it, I want to point out another area in which Adobe veers wildly off course from Mac OS in their effort to unify their code base. The issue I'm referring to is locating files within the Adobe apps.

Have you noticed how Adobe apps frequently lose track of where your files are located on your hard drive?

Try this in an app that is programmed to MacOS standards: Pixelmator. Let's say you create your Pixelmator document and save it to the Desktop. Switch to Finder and drag the file to anywhere you want, including a cloud location like Dropbox or iCloud, then go back into Pixelmator. Cmd click the titlebar and you'll see that the app has instantly found the new location of the file. That's because file-tracking is a Mac OS level feature and app developers need not concern themselves with it.

Try the same thing in any Adobe app. Try moving your files from say, your documents folder, to a different folder in Finder, Adobe apps go completely nuts. They instantly lose the file location and you must manually relink the files inside of Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, etc..

There is just no justification for this. It's _extra_ work for the dev team to write their own file location code and it doesn't work as well as the code you get for free from Apple.

@David Tristam



I've created the above graphic to help explain an important UX concept your team doesn't seem to understand. I'm focusing on the dropdown box, but I really want it to be clear that this isn't the sole problem. The new iconography itself is too similar to each other and vague. I've been using Photoshop since version 6 and with every new UI change I've either really liked it or hardly noticed. But I've NEVER had issues finding something that hasn't moved before.

While making the above image I had enough time to say out loud "Where's the paint brush at", as I scanned over the general location that I'm used to finding it under. Several times I thought it was the History Brush, or perhaps hidden behind another tool. For some reason the design of the new icons cause my focus to be drawn away from that area.

Iconography is a very difficult task and it typically only works after training someone on the meaning that those symbols are meant to represent. What you have is decades of training on how to recognize the symbolism of the application destroyed for trendy styles that will NEED to be replaced again in a year when they look dated and old. Changing them gives no benefit to the user, and in fact is detrimental as it forces you to re-train loyal customers on a worse version.



I'll note that when the toolbar is in single-column mode, it's much easier to find things that are difficult to find in two-column mode. But I will NEVER be in single column mode. The overall context of icon grouping is better conveyed in two columns and it worked great in every one of the previous versions.

There are no redeemable features to this change except perhaps a technical foundation for better supporting different HDPI resolutions. But the visual affordances lost do not assist in this gain. The harder to visually digest icons, do not have any bearing on this (seriously, no one would know that's a bandaid or eraser, just awful). The lower contrast does not help you on a technical level. The loss of identifier cues used to differentiate modes, like Quick Mask, don't help you on a technical level.

Everything about this update needs revised. Hire me to do UX for Adobe. I will work cheap, and you guys obviously need a sanity check in the room.

apparently Adobe likes the fortress. They deleted my post on the business case for ruining the interface. So be it. I'm responding with a cancellation of the Creative Cloud Annual Subscription for my business.

My post on the same topic was also deleted.

Hello Chris, David and David from Adobe,

May I respectfully ask why a number of posts were deleted last night? I understand that this is Adobe's right as this is a private website, maintained by Adobe to help customers. But it would be nice if we had a way to consult the contents of the deleted entries, as is done on some other discussion groups, unless of course they're downright offensive.

I have a reasonable idea about what was in them through my emails, but I can't be sure. From what I can see, most of us are very loyal Adobe customers. I for one have been a Photoshop fan for twenty-five years. Strangely, we possibly care more about the product than you do. We are your bread and butter, pros that know quite a lot about UI and ease of use. Please use your right of deleting entries as rarely as possible. Once again, you may have been right, I'm not sure.

MY LAST WORD ABOUT THE UI
I'm making myself a promise: this will be my very last entry in this thread.

I'm not sure at all that Adobe on one side, and us on the other, really understand each other. Consider the following points:
• You absolutely MUST roll back that horrendous interface. No way around it, it's a huge, terrible, disconnected mistake.
• You should integrate with OS X and Windows. You've chosen otherwise, we can live with it even if we don't like it... as long as it is usable, which it is not right now.
• You've mentioned "touch-friendly". I don't know for sure, but I'm ready to bet that most of us are not interested. Don't demolish the UI for THAT. See, the one that gets too near my 30 in monitors immediately gets a warning! Don't touch to my beautiful, glare-free monitors! So you may have such a problem, but so sorry it is none of our concern.
• Don't go halfway, it's too late for that: roll back the entire interface, whatever the cost. If you choose not to, we will do it for you as many of us have already done including me, by installing a previous version, either 16.0.1 (my case) or 15.

This is no laughing matter. I could not stretch the point too much: you have absolutely no choice. If you choose to keep even part of this horrible UI, the furore of your customers will deafen you.

Nobody wants you to go down in the History books as having created the worst interface ever. Back to work now, I've lost too much time already. And with 16.0.1 installed on my Mac Pro, the smile is back in my face.

Dear Adobe, you have to admit that when Microsoft Paint looks better you guys got it wrong.

After working for the last days with the new UI, there are two things that need to be changed or improved.
First
The visibility of quickmask layers
Second the two steps it takes to change numeric values with sliders.

OK, I admit it, that's the second time I break my promise to stay away from this thread. It seems to be a pointless promise, so sorry.

Bob Laughton, in a comment just above, brings a very important point I think. I would perhaps put it in slightly different words, the meaning being the same though:

• What kind of setup does a certain customer use? A laptop? A 21-23 in monitor? One or more 27-30 in monitor? And what's the resolution?
• Perhaps more important: is it a glossy screen or a matte one?

One or two big matt screens will give you a greater challenge than a smaller glossy one as far as reading small text is concerned. I'f I'm not mistaken, the pros will use bigger, often matte monitors, and those will end up like me squinting at small gray text on a palette away from them in a corner of a big screen.

At the end, it's all about not breaking habits uselessly for one, and more important, legibility for two. For comparison purposes, I include here 3 screenshots:
1. A pane from OS X System Preferences
2. Part of the Smart Sharpen pane with its small greyish text
3. An iPad screenshot from Adobe Photoshop Mix, in which text is absolutely, deliriously perfect!







Interestingly, depending on whether the title is for a checkbox, or field text, or drop-down menu, it will be difficult to read, or not. It depends, and I don't see any reason why. All text should be legible and gray is rarely easy to read.

I was one of 3 retouchers elected to test the latest CC2015 at the retouching studio I work in. We have all rolled back to the previous version.

The UI is simply too hard to work with. Menu items and buttons we use constantly and instinctually, have been changed to look greyed out - the universal language of all things unavailable or broken.

The level of concentration it takes to focus on this conflicting and unintuitive UI is directly in conflict with our worlkflow and speed requirements.

The fact that we can barely tell the difference between a selected layer and a selected layer in quick mask mode is reason enough to roll back. Active selected layers need a MUCH more differentiated appearance from quick mask.

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled don't like the new Photoshop UI.

I have serious problems with the new UI.

I do not like dark interfaces (I do a lot of work that is destined for the Press) and the new grey-on-grey UI is giving me severe eye-strain: so much so that my eyes stream after a few hours.

InDesign is even worse!

The type is FAR too small; and grey-on-grey may look elegant to the UI designer who was responsible for it but it is a total nightmare for the customer who is trying to work with it.

Also, the new icon designs are deplorable:
I do everything with KBSCs but I often cannot distinguish which subset of a tool I have actually selected from those really badly designed icons.

The previous UI was both elegant and practical: unfortunately the new one is not.

Note: This conversation was created from a reply on: PHOTOSHOP CC 2015.1.1 - Problems with UI and crashes.

I had to contact Adobe customer support to downgrade, the actual UI is unusable, plain as that. Everything is a gray blurry mass where I can't find the actual buttons or options quickly as before.

All the panels look inactive!

It is a disaster!!

I updated today and its not just ugly, its a pain in the a** to work with PS now.
WHY CHANGE A WINNER???
I hope its possible to change the interface back.

"I can only bring specific issues to discuss with the XD team who designed the new UI."

Hello Chris,

This is exactly what I feared. If I understand you correctly, and feel free to correct me, there is no special move inside Adobe, no sense of urgency, about this UI that we have repeatedly qualified, not very elegantly I admit, as a disaster. I am sorry but there should be such a movement right now. Or maybe there is one, and then who would be in the know? Are we all losing time and effort here?

To put it bluntly, if Photoshop was a car, it would have a lot of competition, and it would not sell at all in this state. Period.

Always bluntly: Photoshop is a monopoly, and this means that Adobe must, it's a moral obligation, gives us a product we can use. It's a matter of ethics.

Not I need to write an intro to the arguments that will follow. At the end it will be rather longish. Print it and tell THEM to read it.

INTRO
Over the last two decades, monitors have become bigger and bigger. With 30 in. monitors, specially when you have two, that means that some palettes are way too far in their actual state.

At the same time, pixel resolution has gone from around 72 dpi to around 100-110 for 27-30 in monitors that are not 4K or 5K. This means that not only things are now farther, they are also smaller, WHILE THE USER IS FARTHER AWAY.

To compound all this, a portion or your users are now older as is my case. While I still have a very good eyesight at 70 years old, it's no way as good as when I was 30!

If, on top of those well known trends, the interface becomes way harder to read and use, when grey becomes the norm and text size 9 becomes the norm, disaster strikes.

This intro is in no way specific.

It is simply crucial.

Print it and hammer it on the walls of the UI designers' offices. Find the guy that is in "the need to know" and tell him. We need a link of some sort, a direct link. Or choose some users you could trust in this bunch. I for one would spend a couple of days free of charge to explain the extent of the damage that has been done.

MAJOR CHANGES NEEDED
It doesn't matter much to me that the UI be Mac-like or Windows-like. They are very similar nowadays anyway. Create a UI along those lines, somewhere like Mac and/or Windows, and you will be back on tract.

Do not use grey on grey, not for text, it's such a pain that one wants to cry. Black on white, you know, like books, Or almost all good, major websites like Microsoft, Apple, lapresse.ca, lefigaro.fr, lemonade.fr, the BBC, the Guardian, ad nauseam.

A text field is a text field is a text field and should look like such. Idem for a pull-down menu, a checkbox, and BUTTONS. Gives us back buttons, real buttons.

Tell somebody in the need to know that they must do all that.

SPECIFIC CHANGES
By God, I'm overwhelmed. There are too many. They are all about the UI, not the main Photoshop machinery that gets better and better.

1. In the Preferences, crank up one point the text size in the left column. While you're at it, do the same thing everywhere in the interface where you got text that is too small. It was the same in the preferences in the previous version but at least it was black on white, not black on grey,

2. In the Prefs and elsewhere, get the char size the same as the rest for the title of a pull-down menu. No reason to make our lives harder for that specific type of control.

3. In the Prefs look at "Recen File List Contains:" You just went from small black to almost illegible.

4. You give the choice of four "skins". In fact, the two in the middle are unusable because their grey on grey is too much of a stress.

5. Everywhere in the interface: Go back to buttons we can relate with. A default button must be clearly a default button. Its colour or something should be clear.

6. When the user hits Return for the default button, the button should flash for a short period of time, showing the user that there is no mistake. None of the default buttons react visually to a keyboard shortcut at the moment.

7. Let's have a look at the HDR Toning dialogue, it's an example in point.
• Do it any way you want, but bring bath the text as legible as it was. Bring it back as black as it was!
• Bring back the old sliders. The new ones are greyer than a bad November day in Northern Québec.
• The buttons...

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

That should be enough for the time being, don't you think?

And you know what? I'm now ready to bet a bottle of Château La Tour Carnet 2010 from my cellars that I am losing time and effort here, and it fills me with sadness. There is absolutely no feeling of complicity, of being part of something. Let's not this thing become THEM against US.

As said before, my tool is not 16.0,1 that is quite good.