I cant speak for all PS users, but it's not that it is a special UX so much that it is embedded in the muscle memory of the user community, and that degree of familiarity contributes mightily to people being able to get work done quickly.
The closest example I cam think of, which people inside Adobe most certainly know about, is the failed attempts by Quark Xpress to update their product in the late 90s/early 00s, which led to them losing a 95% market share position to Adobe InDesign. You do not mess with the tools that a loud and creative community rely upon to get their jobs done.
is the failed attempts by Quark Xpress to update their product in the late 90s/early 00s
There were a number of factors here - outsourcing engineering leading to a disastrously buggy 4.0, then failing to move to OS X for years after the market was ready to, hostile and arrogant approach to customers ("where else will they go?") and finally the misbegotten attempt to turn a DTP app into a web design tool. InDesign 1 was fairly clunky, but everyone was desperate to escape.
It's an Amiga-like shambles of mismanagement that wasted an early lead; I am still nostalgic for both tbh.
Adobe actually changed a bunch of shortcuts at least a couple of points between photoshop 7 and creative cloud. I remember how I'd developed muscle memory that took a bit to fully overwrite.
Yeah but I wanted to maintain "compatibility" with others using the software whether for discussion's sake or so I can hop on their workstation and not have to think about changing anything. Turning those legacy settings on and having that survive restarts could be flaky/buggy. I got the impression keeping that functionality well tested wasn't the highest thing on their development priorities.
Slightly different experience, but logged into my friends Google TV the other day and it had all my apps and I was correctly signed into everything, background and screensaver all set up. Very smooth experience.
The only way Adobe can get out of this conundrum is by announcing a transition to a new interface, finding ways to incentivize schools to teach the new interface, while keeping the old one around for as long as possible to give time for the oldies to slowly retire. We're talking decades.
The user interface is extremely customizable. You can have a default layout and still keep legacy ones around. You wouldn’t need to kill the legacy layout unless you are removing the cuetomizability.
Oh yes. As someone who writes a lot of Java, I once had a discussion with someone from JetBrains on Twitter about it. It boiled down to me saying "I'm simply not open to change, I like my IDE UIs the way they are right now, thank you very much" and him repeatedly not even trying to understand my point and replying "could you please try the new design and share your feedback".
It can also work the other way though on rare occasions. The Blender UI revamp had the opposite effect, it helped drew more users to the platform (although so did the addition of Cycles and later EeeVee renderers).
In Photoshop there are at least three completely different dialog boxes [0] for saving an image as a JPEG, each with totally different UI widgets and functionality.
They simply refuse to revise anything in the interface—they just keep adding. It's the software equivalent of hoarding.
[0] Save/Save as, Export As, Save for Web (Legacy)
There's also two implementations of the "new document" dialog. The old one, that works instantly, and the new one, that takes a solid second to render no matter how fast your machine is. There's a checkbox in settings to use the old one.
I was the engineer that added that string. Since adding that string...
I joined the photoshop team officially.
Spent maybe 5 years there.
I have left adobe.
I Had a year and a half sabbatical.
Now writing this comment. It's been a while.
The intent was to direct customers to the new “Export As” experience, which was a newer code base and handled some things SFW did not. Enough people couldn’t leave SFW behind though, and it’s been Legacy ever since.
Anecdotally, SFW is the result of converting Adobe ImageReady into a plugin. When IR was originally created, many of its sources were split off from Photoshop to get it off the ground. So now we have two variants of “the same” sources for many files- one evolving in Photoshop, and the other frozen in time in Save for Web.
But how do you know a UX isn't broken, when you've only seen one iteration of it you're whole life and have nothing else to compare it to? Kind of like Plato's Cave Allegory.
You have to try new things, and if you see them fail, then you know which one was the best.
But if you're not gonna ship it to all your millions of users and receive the outrage as feedback, how will you ever know if it works or not?
A/B testing to a few users only works in web-app front-ends, not in professional tools where all single end-user releases need to look and act exactly the same.
Shipping to only a handful of users wasn't a thing in the era of "Gold CD" releases, and even in the era of the internet updates, nobody will want to take part in A/B testing and end up with a different Photoshop UX than what his colleague is using, so you either ship to all or none.
So it seems Photoshop's UI is more of a cause of inertia and resistance to change, rather than nailing right the first time.
A/B testing does very little to improve any UX. It's got merits in performance optimization, where the implementation differs but the contract is static between A and B, but with user interfaces, it generally leads to pessimizations as usage is not proportional to usefulness.
The rare exception is single-purpose interfaces where increasing one singular interaction is an end in itself, e.g. a marketing page, but that's a pretty unique case that is very far removed from a productivity tool.
AZERTY is very bad and France is still stuck with it, despite Québec having a variant of QWERTY for decades, ditto for Switzerland having a custom QWERTZ, and BÉPO being heads above.
Every time I'm confronted with an alphabetical keyboard my brain malfunctions. It should be easy but I'll be on R or S looking for the T and spend 5 minutes scanning for it. Usually via remote with some crappy app trying to login or search and its on a big TV huge, usually people watching making the awkwardness even worse since everyone else can obviously see where the T is.
I am not native but I feel pleasure from using Dvorak and chatting with no need to look at keyboard. I am trying to spread acknowledgement about Dvorak among young folks and those who agreed to learn feel the same boost. The difference is unimaginable for those who already has some muscle memory for anything related to Qwerty such as Ctrl-C. So the difference is between creating the layout for touchtyping goals and creating the layout for any other ones.
Hard to do when the power users for the most part try to block analytics and the insider testers have very fluid workflows and there is no such thing as death by a thousand papercuts to them. They aren't getting the signal because the people that should be telling them the signal are actively denying sending the signal.
As someone, who used Photoshop a lot, the UI/UX is good. It would be pretty hard to make it significantly better. And yes, even if you somehow made it better, many users would complain, because they have muscle memory of the UX, and are extremely efficient with it.
It would be curious to see UX timeline of what PS influenced, and what influenced it, in mouse age. A lot of desktop derivative products seem to hold on PS-like UI, it's all very mutually reinforcing. I'm not sure what iPad UX is like. I remember autocad products also adding ribbon system and it wasn't end of the world, but also very few ppl that I know end up migrating.
Part of me feels like it's... either very optimal for masses to learn because very few PSers (outside of photography) I know have professional peripherals (some have hotkey stickers on keycaps), vs lots of other creative fields have specialized decks/hardware to make streamline workflow.
Like part of me feels like there is a better physical hardware implmentation to manipulate all the curves/histograms other than moving around with mouse, but mouse+keyboard is... good enough.
A lot of PS 1.0's UI (2-col toolbox on the left etc) owes its heritage to MacPaint, which was a launch app for the Mac. Even the iPad shares keyboard shortcuts set by the original Mac, though has considerably broken away in other aspects.
When Photoshop went subscription I bought the full version of CS6 (or whatever the last non-subscription version was). It was very expensive. Then when that stopped working on Mac, I tried using every reasonable competitor, paid for several. I'm sure some of them are very competent tools, but it was a nightmare trying to learn a new UI. I bit the bullet and started paying the subscription.
