by Tyrus Antas at 6:52 AM
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. And 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.
Indeed. And what's Adobe going to do about it? John writes about making the UI task based. A task based interface changes depending on what task the user is currently doing. A journalist has a set of needs, so does a designer or a web developer. The interface should be able to accommodate those needs and make it easy for users to find the features they need while not losing the power that made Photoshop the most popular photo manipulation software.
Microsoft Office 2007 was a first step to that task based UI vision but it's certainly not the final destination. John's essential 6 points:
Microsoft Office 2007 was a first step to that task based UI vision but it's certainly not the final destination. John's essential 6 points:
- make Photoshop everything you need, nothing you don't
- make Photoshop dramatically more configurable
- tune the application to your taste, then share the knowledge
- present solutions via task-oriented workspaces
- remove outmoded functionality
- polish what's already present
A good response to John's post was this suggestion for workspaces:
One direction to take it might be to have some sort of exportable XML file for Workspaces. So I can export my customization and share it with others.[John Nack]
1 Comments:
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By
Designer, at
November 8, 2007 8:24 AM
I like the 2007 office version but don't know how great this would work on a professional photo manipulation product. Besides, people create habits and I'm sure many designers out there wouldn't like to see their decades-old "friend" to change that much.