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Speaking of UI, I’ve been using Photoshop since 1999 and it’s remarkable how little the UI has changed. Sure there are new panels and features, but the basic la

Speaking of UI, I’ve been using Photoshop since 1999 and it’s remarkable how little the UI has changed. Sure there are new panels and features, but the basic layout and most of the keyboard shortcuts are all the same. The consistency and familiarity is really nice but I’m sure they’ve sacrificed a ton of UX potential to keep old farts like me.

gibolt 6y ago
Changing the UI would raise so much uproar. Millions of workflows would have to change. In addition, it just does so much that changing it would be a very costly task likely to break a lot of things and end up removing features that some tiny niche still uses.
- mdip 6y ago
  That's it. I didn't even really use Photoshop in a professional capacity, but it's probably worse in that situation. In the past, if you wanted to do something "cool looking" on the web, you'd describe to Google something you saw and invariably land on some Photoshop tutorial. It doesn't translate to other things easily. So to switch to something like GIMP, you have to not only learn the interface, but learn how to translate all of the useful help "in the wild" from Photoshop to GIMP. I remember when I sat down to try to learn paths and such in Photoshop, thinking, "Is this really the best they could come up with?" But, yeah, it was ... when they came up with it and everyone learned how to use it. A switch would eliminate the moat that the product has. And that's what's been chipped away at, in general. I haven't had any need of Photoshop for web dev work in a long time. My image processing needs rarely go beyond the command-line, these days, because many other things we relied on PS for are described in css or are vectors rather than image files.
pfranz 6y ago
That's kind of the problem Photoshop has been painted into. As things were added they were kind of shoved into the spots in the UI that existed early on. Old-timers have muscle memory, but it's hard for newcomers to hunt for things because it's not logically organized. The steep learning curve is there for newcomers, but since it's what everyone uses they learn it. Throw enough other hurdles like subscriptions and people will start to switch. It will be hard to dig themselves back out because changing their UI alienates old-timers.
pixelrevision 6y ago
As someone who is trying to use pixelmator after 25 years of photoshop there is a lot of muscle memory to overcome.

gibolt 6y ago

Changing the UI would raise so much uproar. Millions of workflows would have to change. In addition, it just does so much that changing it would be a very costly task likely to break a lot of things and end up removing features that some tiny niche still uses.

mdip 6y ago
That's it. I didn't even really use Photoshop in a professional capacity, but it's probably worse in that situation. In the past, if you wanted to do something "cool looking" on the web, you'd describe to Google something you saw and invariably land on some Photoshop tutorial. It doesn't translate to other things easily. So to switch to something like GIMP, you have to not only learn the interface, but learn how to translate all of the useful help "in the wild" from Photoshop to GIMP. I remember when I sat down to try to learn paths and such in Photoshop, thinking, "Is this really the best they could come up with?" But, yeah, it was ... when they came up with it and everyone learned how to use it. A switch would eliminate the moat that the product has. And that's what's been chipped away at, in general. I haven't had any need of Photoshop for web dev work in a long time. My image processing needs rarely go beyond the command-line, these days, because many other things we relied on PS for are described in css or are vectors rather than image files.

pfranz 6y ago

That's kind of the problem Photoshop has been painted into. As things were added they were kind of shoved into the spots in the UI that existed early on. Old-timers have muscle memory, but it's hard for newcomers to hunt for things because it's not logically organized. The steep learning curve is there for newcomers, but since it's what everyone uses they learn it. Throw enough other hurdles like subscriptions and people will start to switch. It will be hard to dig themselves back out because changing their UI alienates old-timers.

pixelrevision 6y ago

As someone who is trying to use pixelmator after 25 years of photoshop there is a lot of muscle memory to overcome.