6 ms·

You can see this in venerable software which has lived through the times of "designing for the user" and is still being developed in the times of "designing for

by rogual 2y ago

You can see this in venerable software which has lived through the times of "designing for the user" and is still being developed in the times of "designing for the business". Take Photoshop, for example, first released in 1987, last updated yesterday. Use it and you can see the two ages like rings in a tree. At the core of Photoshop is a consistent, powerful, tightly-coded, thoughtfully-designed set of tools for creating and manipulating images. Once you learn the conventions, it feels like the computer is on your side, you're free, you're force-multiplied, your thoughts are manifest. It's really special and you can see there's a good reason this program achieved total dominance in its field. And you can also see, right beside and on top of and surrounding that, a more recent accretion disc of features with a more modern sensibility. Dialogs that render in web-views and take seconds to open. "Sign in". Literal advertisements in the UI, styled to look like tooltips. You know the thing that pops up to tell you about the pen tool? There's an identically-styled one that pops up to tell you about Adobe Whatever, only $19.99/mo. And then of course there's Creative Cloud itself. This is evident in Mac OS X, too, another piece of software that spans both eras. You've still got a lot of the stuff from the 2000s, with 2000s goals like being consistent and fast and nice to use. A lot of that is still there, perhaps because Apple's current crop of engineers can't really touch it without breaking it (not that it always stops them, but some of them know their limits). And right next to and amongst that, you've got ads in System Settings, you've got Apple News, you've got Apple Books that breaks every UI convention it can find. There are many such cases. Windows, too. And MS Word. One day, all these products will be gone, and people will only know MBA-ware. They won't know it can be any other way.

dist-epoch 2y ago
> At the core of Photoshop is a consistent, powerful, tightly-coded, thoughtfully-designed set of tools for creating and manipulating images. Once you learn the conventions, it feels like the computer is on your side, you're free, you're force-multiplied, your thoughts are manifest. It's funny that today there still isn't a free image editing software comparable with the Photoshop from 2000. Krita is close, but still cumbersome to use.
- misnome 2y ago
  I’m sure that it is a complete coincidence that CS6, the last before they moved to a subscription model, is the last time it was mostly nonsense-free
  - marsovo 2y ago
    Indeed. The trouble with subscriptions is that you don't need to make the new version actually good enough to convince people to upgrade, you just need to make it not bad enough for people to abandon the subscription entirely. I think the same thing happened to Windows and Office. Having said that, there's probably another elephant in the room, namely the current generation that grew up with phones and tablets and didn't really learn to use traditional computers fluently
- noduerme 2y ago
  I would love to jettison Photoshop/Illustrator and just use Affinity. Illustrator has recently gone from taking 30 seconds to over 2 minutes to launch on my M1. It's an atrocity. But Adobe software is so entrenched in printing that, even though print media is only 10% or less of what I do these days, it would just be an endless headache to deal with file conversions to and from other designers, print shops and publishers. And anyway I expect Affinity will go the same way soon, now that they're owned by Canva.
- rcarmo 2y ago
  I'm surprised nobody mentioned GIMP in the 2 hours since you wrote this (I still use Fireworks inside WINE).
  - card_zero 2y ago
    I'm not particularly surprised: who wants to try to hold up GIMP as an exemplar of a good interface? Maybe by arguing "it's not as bad as it was, and now it hardly sucks at all". I'm an old Photoshop user who has GIMP now. I'd like to do a breakdown of everything that's wrong with its interface behavior, but analysing exactly how it does behave would be a major mission. There's something - several things - wrong with how it selects, moves, deselects, selects layers, and zooms, compared to what I expect for the workflow I try to have. Possibly this is just a matter of needing to learn new conventions, but possibly I have learned the GIMP conventions and they're just clunky. Interesting, though, since this is organic, grass roots, free software interface crappiness, not the coercive corporate kind.
scotty79 2y ago
> At the core of Photoshop is a consistent, powerful, tightly-coded, thoughtfully-designed set of tools for creating and manipulating images. Once you learn the conventions,[...] Photoshop has a terrible set of conventions. I'd take Macromedia Fireworks any day of the week instead. But Adobe bought Macromedia and gradually killed Fireworks in 8 years due to "overlap in functionality" between it and 3 other Adobe products. That action pretty much enabled enshi*tification of Photoshop which wrapped the terrible core of Photoshop with terrible layers of web and ads.
- rcarmo 2y ago
  I still run Fireworks under WINE in Fedora. The only real pain point is that the fonts are stupefyingly small in comparison to other apps due to the way modern GUIs and resolutions have grown (this is fixable, but not everywhere).
- mistrial9 2y ago
  Fireworks is great, still used today
the_third_wave 2y ago
> One day, all these products will be gone, and people will only know MBA-ware. They won't know it can be any other way. Just like vinyl made a comeback 'real' software will come back as well, maybe running in an emulator in a browser. Yes, there will be copyright problems, yes there will be hurdles but if and when MBAware becomes the norm software will persevere. Free software for sure, commercial software most likely even if legally on shaky foundations. The tighter they grip, the more users will slip from their clutches.
- patates 2y ago
  > vinyl made a comeback Well, at least one of us must be living in a bubble.
  - batch12 2y ago
    I don't know about a full comeback, but it is really the only physical format I see for sale in major retail stores in the US (like Walmart, etc.) The format had outpaced CDs recently [0], but I think due to a decline in CD sales too. [0] (2023) https://www.bbc.com/news/64919126.amp https://www.bbc.com/news/64919126.amp
    - sorenjan 2y ago
      According to a study in 2023 half of vinyl buyers in the US doesn't have a record player. It seems like for a lot of people it's less of a music media and more a combination of supporting their favorite artists and home decor or collecting cards. My guess is that a majority of all vinyl buyers listen to a lot of digital music as well. https://consequence.net/2023/04/half-vinyl-buyers-record-player-study/ https://consequence.net/2023/04/half-vinyl-buyers-record-pla...
  - the_third_wave 2y ago
    It went from 'nearly dead, scrap the factories' to 'we need more manufacturing capacity to supply the increasing demand'. Not a bubble, i don't do vinyl but I know several people who do. The same will happen to 'real software' once the current iteration of productivity tools can no longer be distinguished from advertisements for such, once you need to really dig down to do simple things but have "AI enhanced autoclippy" under every "button". It is just the way things go no matter the field: 'craft' beer, vinyl, sourdough, vintage whatever. In some cases it is actually rational, in others (vinyl) it is mostly driven by emotional factors. The 'craft software' revival would be an example of a rational move.
AshamedCaptain 2y ago
One example in MS Word is the ribbon. It is relatively recent invention, and when it was introduced, _at least_ they went to the effort of using telemetry to guess which features where actually often utilized versus which ones where not, and designed the ribbons in accordance. Nowadays every new "feature" introduced in MS Word is just randomly appended to the right end of the main ribbon. As it is now you open a default install of MS Word and at least 1/3 of the ribbon is stuff that is being pushed to the users, not necessarily stuff that users want to use. At least I can keep customizing it to remove the new crap they add, but how long until this customization ability is removed for "UI consistency" ?
rcarmo 2y ago
Personally, I think the web is 200% to blame. It has wiped out generations of careful UX design (remember Tog in Interface?) and very, very responsive and usable native (and mostly standard-looking) UI toolkits in favor of bland, whitespace-laden scrolling nightmares that are instantly delivered to millions of people through a browser and thus create a low-skills, high-maintenance accretion disc of stuff that isn't really focused on the needs of users--at least not "power" ones. I know that front-end devs won't like this, but modern web development is the epitome of quantity (both in terms of reach and of the insane amount of approaches used to compensate for the browser's constraints) over quality, and I suppose that will stay the same forever now that any modern machine can run the complexity equivalent of multiple operating systems while showing cat pictures.
- Earw0rm 2y ago
  Front-end dev is optimising for a different set of constraints than HIG-era UIs. Primarily that constraint is "looks good in a presentation for an MBA with a 30-second attention span". Secondarily "new and hook-y enough to pull people in". That said... HIG UIs are good at what they're good at. But there is an element of a similar phenomenon to how walled-gardens (Facebook most of all, but also Google, Slack, Discord..) took over from open, standards-based protocols and clients. Their speed of integration and iteration gave them an evolutionary edge that the open-client world couldn't keep up with. Similarly if you look at e.g. navigation apps or recipe apps. Can an HIG UI do a fairly good job? Sure, and in ways that are predictable, accessible, intuitive and maybe even scriptable. But a scrolly, amorphous web-style UI will be able to do the job quicker and with more distinctive branding/style and less visual clutter. Basically I don't think a standardised child-of-HIG formalised UI/UX grammar could keep up with the pace of change the last 10-15 years. Probably the nearest we have is Material Design?
  - mckn1ght 2y ago
    > walled-gardens (Facebook most of all, but also Google, Slack, Discord..) took over from open, standards-based protocols and clients. Their speed of integration and iteration gave them an evolutionary edge that the open-client world couldn't keep up with Seems to me to be a combination of things, none of which indicate that the new products are implicitly better than the old. The old products could’ve incorporated the best elements of the new. But there are a few problems with that: - legacy codebases are harder to change, it’s easier to just replace them, at least until the new system becomes legacy. slack and discord are now at the “helpful onboarding tooltip” stage - the tooling evolved: languages, debuggers, IDEs, design tools, collaboration tools and computers themselves all evolved in the time since those HIG UIs were originally released. That partially explains how rapidly the replacements could be built. and, true, there was time for the UX to sink in and think about what would be nice to add, like reactjis in chat - incentive structures: VCs throw tons of money at a competing idea in hopes that it pays off big by becoming the new standard. They can’t do that with either open source or an existing enterprise company
DanielHB 2y ago
I think you have a bit of rose tinted glasses, I remember back in the day how much people complained about every feature being shoved into the title bar menus of word and photoshop. Eventually growing the menus too long with a bunch of features no one cared about and obscuring the actual useful ones.
- rcarmo 2y ago
  Yeah. This (and Fitt's Law) is actually why the ribbon UI came about. 80% of the most common stuff is right there, and you can customize or search for the rest.
  - DanielHB 2y ago
    Not only that, but in photoshop and word dialogs for features released in 1995 had different design conventions from dialogs from feature released in 1999. Not UI controls and stuff like that (everything was still using win32), but the design language itself. Like how to display things to user or how to align buttons and stuff like that. If anything this kind of layout patterns are better today than they were back then. What the OP is complaining about was ALWAYS a problem for any long-lived software. But given how much _older_ some software is today it is no wonder it is way more noticeable. Win95 had a bunch of Win3.1 settings dialogs just like Win11 still has a bunch of Windows98 setting dialogs (the network adapter TCP/IP configuration one comes to mind). I mean just look at this: https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/l85hsx/windows_31_just_called_they_want_their_dialog_back/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/l85hsx/windows_3...
    - card_zero 2y ago
      In Win11, the old-style settings dialogs are the good ones, that allow you to change the settings.
    - inurqubits 2y ago
      Photoshop used a custom UI toolkit which automatically generated the dialogs layout based on a description of their contents (string field, boolean, color picker, ...)
AndrewKemendo 2y ago
What a great description We live the timeline where the Feringi were the ones who bootstrapped the Borg with their hyper-consumption-trade culture All will be consumed into the financial market (Borg cube) eventually
PaulHoule 2y ago
My understanding is the old Photoshop was pretty bad. I went through a phase of being a student of file formats and the PSD format is practically a case study in how not to do it. (By my metrics, PDF was excellent for its time; they've been able to cram so much crazy stuff into PDF because the foundation is good) When I first used it on a Mac circa '95 or '96, it felt like a legacy product when I was using it for web work because the color management features intended for print meant it would always screw the colors up if you output for the web [1] if you didn't disable color management, whereas the GIMP 'just worked' because it didn't color manage. [2] To play devil's advocate, the old Photoshop was a huge lump sum which meant you'd buy one version and then go six years without updating it. The new one is more accessible to people. Also, I find the A.I. features in Photoshop pretty useful, it is easier than ever to zap things out of images: it took just seconds to disappear a cable in [3] for which the older tools didn't work so well. For [4] it removed a splotch and later I had it add a row of bricks to the bottom to improve the visual balance of the image. Note people sure complained about Office in the '95 era, see [5] [1] sRGB was new! [2] Funny I do a lot of work for print now, some of which pushes the boundaries of color management, such as making red-cyan anaglyph stereograms [3] https://bsky.app/profile/up-8.bsky.social/post/3lh7qqbqra22y https://bsky.app/profile/up-8.bsky.social/post/3lh7qqbqra22y [4] https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110607460518784045 https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110607460518784045 [5] https://www.amazon.com/Office-97-Annoyances-Lee-Hudspeth/dp/1565923103 https://www.amazon.com/Office-97-Annoyances-Lee-Hudspeth/dp/...
ge96 2y ago
Windows has been annoying me with this notification that keeps popping up time to time "Hey want to use Adobe?" in the bottom right corner
- reginald78 2y ago
  I just disable the notifications entirely. If you don't want me to view it as a garbage dump stop putting all your garbage there.
hulitu 2y ago
> There are many such cases. Windows, too. And MS Word. The current Windows and Word are a shitshow from an UX perspective.

by rogual 2y ago

dist-epoch 2y ago

> At the core of Photoshop is a consistent, powerful, tightly-coded, thoughtfully-designed set of tools for creating and manipulating images. Once you learn the conventions, it feels like the computer is on your side, you're free, you're force-multiplied, your thoughts are manifest. It's funny that today there still isn't a free image editing software comparable with the Photoshop from 2000. Krita is close, but still cumbersome to use.

misnome 2y ago
I’m sure that it is a complete coincidence that CS6, the last before they moved to a subscription model, is the last time it was mostly nonsense-free
- marsovo 2y ago
  Indeed. The trouble with subscriptions is that you don't need to make the new version actually good enough to convince people to upgrade, you just need to make it not bad enough for people to abandon the subscription entirely. I think the same thing happened to Windows and Office. Having said that, there's probably another elephant in the room, namely the current generation that grew up with phones and tablets and didn't really learn to use traditional computers fluently
noduerme 2y ago
I would love to jettison Photoshop/Illustrator and just use Affinity. Illustrator has recently gone from taking 30 seconds to over 2 minutes to launch on my M1. It's an atrocity. But Adobe software is so entrenched in printing that, even though print media is only 10% or less of what I do these days, it would just be an endless headache to deal with file conversions to and from other designers, print shops and publishers. And anyway I expect Affinity will go the same way soon, now that they're owned by Canva.
rcarmo 2y ago
I'm surprised nobody mentioned GIMP in the 2 hours since you wrote this (I still use Fireworks inside WINE).
- card_zero 2y ago
  I'm not particularly surprised: who wants to try to hold up GIMP as an exemplar of a good interface? Maybe by arguing "it's not as bad as it was, and now it hardly sucks at all". I'm an old Photoshop user who has GIMP now. I'd like to do a breakdown of everything that's wrong with its interface behavior, but analysing exactly how it does behave would be a major mission. There's something - several things - wrong with how it selects, moves, deselects, selects layers, and zooms, compared to what I expect for the workflow I try to have. Possibly this is just a matter of needing to learn new conventions, but possibly I have learned the GIMP conventions and they're just clunky. Interesting, though, since this is organic, grass roots, free software interface crappiness, not the coercive corporate kind.

scotty79 2y ago

> At the core of Photoshop is a consistent, powerful, tightly-coded, thoughtfully-designed set of tools for creating and manipulating images. Once you learn the conventions,[...] Photoshop has a terrible set of conventions. I'd take Macromedia Fireworks any day of the week instead. But Adobe bought Macromedia and gradually killed Fireworks in 8 years due to "overlap in functionality" between it and 3 other Adobe products. That action pretty much enabled enshi*tification of Photoshop which wrapped the terrible core of Photoshop with terrible layers of web and ads.

rcarmo 2y ago
I still run Fireworks under WINE in Fedora. The only real pain point is that the fonts are stupefyingly small in comparison to other apps due to the way modern GUIs and resolutions have grown (this is fixable, but not everywhere).
mistrial9 2y ago
Fireworks is great, still used today

the_third_wave 2y ago

> One day, all these products will be gone, and people will only know MBA-ware. They won't know it can be any other way. Just like vinyl made a comeback 'real' software will come back as well, maybe running in an emulator in a browser. Yes, there will be copyright problems, yes there will be hurdles but if and when MBAware becomes the norm software will persevere. Free software for sure, commercial software most likely even if legally on shaky foundations. The tighter they grip, the more users will slip from their clutches.

patates 2y ago
> vinyl made a comeback Well, at least one of us must be living in a bubble.
- batch12 2y ago
  I don't know about a full comeback, but it is really the only physical format I see for sale in major retail stores in the US (like Walmart, etc.) The format had outpaced CDs recently [0], but I think due to a decline in CD sales too. [0] (2023) https://www.bbc.com/news/64919126.amp https://www.bbc.com/news/64919126.amp
  - sorenjan 2y ago
    According to a study in 2023 half of vinyl buyers in the US doesn't have a record player. It seems like for a lot of people it's less of a music media and more a combination of supporting their favorite artists and home decor or collecting cards. My guess is that a majority of all vinyl buyers listen to a lot of digital music as well. https://consequence.net/2023/04/half-vinyl-buyers-record-player-study/ https://consequence.net/2023/04/half-vinyl-buyers-record-pla...
- the_third_wave 2y ago
  It went from 'nearly dead, scrap the factories' to 'we need more manufacturing capacity to supply the increasing demand'. Not a bubble, i don't do vinyl but I know several people who do. The same will happen to 'real software' once the current iteration of productivity tools can no longer be distinguished from advertisements for such, once you need to really dig down to do simple things but have "AI enhanced autoclippy" under every "button". It is just the way things go no matter the field: 'craft' beer, vinyl, sourdough, vintage whatever. In some cases it is actually rational, in others (vinyl) it is mostly driven by emotional factors. The 'craft software' revival would be an example of a rational move.

AshamedCaptain 2y ago

One example in MS Word is the ribbon. It is relatively recent invention, and when it was introduced, _at least_ they went to the effort of using telemetry to guess which features where actually often utilized versus which ones where not, and designed the ribbons in accordance. Nowadays every new "feature" introduced in MS Word is just randomly appended to the right end of the main ribbon. As it is now you open a default install of MS Word and at least 1/3 of the ribbon is stuff that is being pushed to the users, not necessarily stuff that users want to use. At least I can keep customizing it to remove the new crap they add, but how long until this customization ability is removed for "UI consistency" ?

rcarmo 2y ago

Personally, I think the web is 200% to blame. It has wiped out generations of careful UX design (remember Tog in Interface?) and very, very responsive and usable native (and mostly standard-looking) UI toolkits in favor of bland, whitespace-laden scrolling nightmares that are instantly delivered to millions of people through a browser and thus create a low-skills, high-maintenance accretion disc of stuff that isn't really focused on the needs of users--at least not "power" ones. I know that front-end devs won't like this, but modern web development is the epitome of quantity (both in terms of reach and of the insane amount of approaches used to compensate for the browser's constraints) over quality, and I suppose that will stay the same forever now that any modern machine can run the complexity equivalent of multiple operating systems while showing cat pictures.

Earw0rm 2y ago
Front-end dev is optimising for a different set of constraints than HIG-era UIs. Primarily that constraint is "looks good in a presentation for an MBA with a 30-second attention span". Secondarily "new and hook-y enough to pull people in". That said... HIG UIs are good at what they're good at. But there is an element of a similar phenomenon to how walled-gardens (Facebook most of all, but also Google, Slack, Discord..) took over from open, standards-based protocols and clients. Their speed of integration and iteration gave them an evolutionary edge that the open-client world couldn't keep up with. Similarly if you look at e.g. navigation apps or recipe apps. Can an HIG UI do a fairly good job? Sure, and in ways that are predictable, accessible, intuitive and maybe even scriptable. But a scrolly, amorphous web-style UI will be able to do the job quicker and with more distinctive branding/style and less visual clutter. Basically I don't think a standardised child-of-HIG formalised UI/UX grammar could keep up with the pace of change the last 10-15 years. Probably the nearest we have is Material Design?
- mckn1ght 2y ago
  > walled-gardens (Facebook most of all, but also Google, Slack, Discord..) took over from open, standards-based protocols and clients. Their speed of integration and iteration gave them an evolutionary edge that the open-client world couldn't keep up with Seems to me to be a combination of things, none of which indicate that the new products are implicitly better than the old. The old products could’ve incorporated the best elements of the new. But there are a few problems with that: - legacy codebases are harder to change, it’s easier to just replace them, at least until the new system becomes legacy. slack and discord are now at the “helpful onboarding tooltip” stage - the tooling evolved: languages, debuggers, IDEs, design tools, collaboration tools and computers themselves all evolved in the time since those HIG UIs were originally released. That partially explains how rapidly the replacements could be built. and, true, there was time for the UX to sink in and think about what would be nice to add, like reactjis in chat - incentive structures: VCs throw tons of money at a competing idea in hopes that it pays off big by becoming the new standard. They can’t do that with either open source or an existing enterprise company

DanielHB 2y ago

I think you have a bit of rose tinted glasses, I remember back in the day how much people complained about every feature being shoved into the title bar menus of word and photoshop. Eventually growing the menus too long with a bunch of features no one cared about and obscuring the actual useful ones.

rcarmo 2y ago
Yeah. This (and Fitt's Law) is actually why the ribbon UI came about. 80% of the most common stuff is right there, and you can customize or search for the rest.
- DanielHB 2y ago
  Not only that, but in photoshop and word dialogs for features released in 1995 had different design conventions from dialogs from feature released in 1999. Not UI controls and stuff like that (everything was still using win32), but the design language itself. Like how to display things to user or how to align buttons and stuff like that. If anything this kind of layout patterns are better today than they were back then. What the OP is complaining about was ALWAYS a problem for any long-lived software. But given how much _older_ some software is today it is no wonder it is way more noticeable. Win95 had a bunch of Win3.1 settings dialogs just like Win11 still has a bunch of Windows98 setting dialogs (the network adapter TCP/IP configuration one comes to mind). I mean just look at this: https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/l85hsx/windows_31_just_called_they_want_their_dialog_back/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/l85hsx/windows_3...
  - card_zero 2y ago
    In Win11, the old-style settings dialogs are the good ones, that allow you to change the settings.
  - inurqubits 2y ago
    Photoshop used a custom UI toolkit which automatically generated the dialogs layout based on a description of their contents (string field, boolean, color picker, ...)

AndrewKemendo 2y ago

What a great description We live the timeline where the Feringi were the ones who bootstrapped the Borg with their hyper-consumption-trade culture All will be consumed into the financial market (Borg cube) eventually

PaulHoule 2y ago

My understanding is the old Photoshop was pretty bad. I went through a phase of being a student of file formats and the PSD format is practically a case study in how not to do it. (By my metrics, PDF was excellent for its time; they've been able to cram so much crazy stuff into PDF because the foundation is good) When I first used it on a Mac circa '95 or '96, it felt like a legacy product when I was using it for web work because the color management features intended for print meant it would always screw the colors up if you output for the web [1] if you didn't disable color management, whereas the GIMP 'just worked' because it didn't color manage. [2] To play devil's advocate, the old Photoshop was a huge lump sum which meant you'd buy one version and then go six years without updating it. The new one is more accessible to people. Also, I find the A.I. features in Photoshop pretty useful, it is easier than ever to zap things out of images: it took just seconds to disappear a cable in [3] for which the older tools didn't work so well. For [4] it removed a splotch and later I had it add a row of bricks to the bottom to improve the visual balance of the image. Note people sure complained about Office in the '95 era, see [5] [1] sRGB was new! [2] Funny I do a lot of work for print now, some of which pushes the boundaries of color management, such as making red-cyan anaglyph stereograms [3] https://bsky.app/profile/up-8.bsky.social/post/3lh7qqbqra22y https://bsky.app/profile/up-8.bsky.social/post/3lh7qqbqra22y [4] https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110607460518784045 https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110607460518784045 [5] https://www.amazon.com/Office-97-Annoyances-Lee-Hudspeth/dp/1565923103 https://www.amazon.com/Office-97-Annoyances-Lee-Hudspeth/dp/...

ge96 2y ago

Windows has been annoying me with this notification that keeps popping up time to time "Hey want to use Adobe?" in the bottom right corner

reginald78 2y ago
I just disable the notifications entirely. If you don't want me to view it as a garbage dump stop putting all your garbage there.

hulitu 2y ago

> There are many such cases. Windows, too. And MS Word. The current Windows and Word are a shitshow from an UX perspective.