5 ms·
No point fixing something that isn't broken (someone please tell Microsoft)
by biofox 2y ago
No point fixing something that isn't broken (someone please tell Microsoft)
- Rinzler89 2y ago>No point fixing something that isn't broken 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.
- Dylan16807 2y ago"try" doesn't imply "ship to millions of customers" And sometimes there's good enough and you should leave it alone. QWERTY isn't optimal but it's not very far from it.
- Rinzler89 2y agoBut 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.
- marginalia_nu 2y agoA/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.
- Dylan16807 2y agoYou bring in testers and UI experts, and you have the experts watch the testers. Shipping to mass market is a bad way to get feedback.
- Karunamon 2y agoAre there such a thing as UI experts anymore? It seems like we only have designers left, and I am none too thrilled about their influence.
- eimrine 2y agoQwerty is a significant brake in learning English from scratch.
- Dylan16807 2y agoHow so? And I'm pretty sure an alphabetical keyboard would do much more harm than good, if that's the implied alternative.
- pests 2y agoEvery 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. /end rant
- eimrine 2y ago> How so? 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.
- aredox 2y agoAZERTY 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.
- beau_g 2y agoUse gimp, add a new layer, paste something into it, and resize it, then you will know
- frankharv 2y agoHow about PhotoShop's Magic Lasso? I have not found many tools that work as well and make productivity great.
- navjack27 2y agoHard 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.
- eimrine 2y agoАre you saying this about OS which shows ads in Start menu?
- turnsout 2y agoIn 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)
- bombcar 2y agoI'm ride-or-die on Save for Web (Legacy), it's the way to go by far. Now if they'd just integrate the tinypng plugin that was deprecated in 2023 - https://help.tinify.com/help/deprecation-of-the-photoshop-plugin https://help.tinify.com/help/deprecation-of-the-photoshop-pl...
- turnsout 2y agoSame—I just wish they'd either drop the "(Legacy)" and admit that they can never remove it, or add those same features to the Export dialog!
- reddalo 2y agoHow long has the Save for Web been "Legacy"? I feel like it's been there for a long time.
- jaredwy 2y agoI 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.
- turnsout 2y agoHa, comments like this are why I love hn!
- MontagFTB 2y agoThe 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.