On May 2, 2008, at 5:23 AM, mark schraad wrote: > I don't find Adobe products to be particularly user friendly
That's certainly a loaded term, isn't it? "User friendly." Which user and what constitutes "friendly?" > I found my self wondering if, for professional tools, there is > greater adoption, > product loyalty and stickiness in leaving a certain amount of > difficulty in the UI? Another loaded way of thinking about it. Be careful. You can't have a good discussion approaching it this way. Photoshop is and never was intentionally made "difficult." And to this day, I hate a few aspects of how it does things (and always have, even when I was working on it) but overall, it's still a world-class tool that has not been surpassed by anyone else trying to solve the same problems. To that end, Photoshop is actually pretty easy to a lot of things once you have learned how to use it. In fact, Photoshop got its start being easier to use than what else was available at the time, like Letraset ColorStudio. Over time, as Photoshop became a mission- critical production tool for a broad set of industries -- from print to the web to film to even NASA research -- it started to add more and more complicated features. As with anything that starts simply and adds more functionality, keeping it under control can become a problem. I personally think Photoshop has done a better job than most containing that feature bloat, while acknowledging that is does indeed have feature bloat. But Photoshop was going to add more features like it or not. The business demanded it. Users demanded it. And the nature of capitalism demands it. Given that, if anyone thinks they can make a rich, complicated, industrial strength tool "easy to use" and if that measuring stick is using anyone you may know who is not a professional in the particular industry the tool is designed for, I wish you the best of luck on that path to insanity. It's just an entirely inappropriate way to approach the design problem. Complicated things will always be complicated, by nature. Your task as the designer of such complicated features and tools is to not make them more complicated than they already are. But trying to make inherently complicated things "easy to use" is really just wishful thinking. And making them "user friendly" requires very specific metrics on who the "user" is and what they think is "friendly." > The thinking goes... if the process is to easy, then everyone can do > it and it erodes my (the professional user's) > value in the marketplace. I know of no one who has ever said that or thinks like that. Further, I can certainly tell you that no one on the Photoshop team ever thought along those lines. As for a related version of my opinion of this topic, I wrote about a long time ago: http://www.designbyfire.com/?p=10 -- Andrei Herasimchuk Principal, Involution Studios innovating the digital world e. [EMAIL PROTECTED] c. +1 408 306 6422 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
