P: New user interface lacks contrast and many usability cues, lots of other problems

What I find interesting is that no one at Adobe has commented on this thread. This isn't the path to good customer service.

I am surprised that Adobe would make such a change without some input from us users. A poll might be nice BEFORE you make major changes like this.

This interface change is not good. And not good for a number of reasons. But most importantly, it makes it much more difficult to "see" the interface. This is simply bad UI. And, for older folks, it's even worse.

PLEASE EXPLAIN THIS HERE IN THIS THREAD. PLEASE ADDRESS THIS ISSUE HERE IN THIS THREAD. That's what you created these forums for. Otherwise, you just have many disgruntled users complaining. At the very bottom of this textfield you even ask us to "Get emotional. Describe hos this topic makes you feel." Well, here's how I feel:

Here's what I did: Go to your Creative Cloud Dashboard, click on "old versions" and do an install of 2014. I have both on my machine and am now using 2014 until Adobe "fixes" their upgrade.

Just scroll down to the bottom of the CC menu and reinstall the old version.

Complaining aside - how do I revert to the older UI? Is it possible to do it myself without uninstalling the app?

It still baffles me, firstly how a 'professional' design team came up with this abomination of a UI and secondly that Adobe released it as an 'update (lol)' without obviously testing it in the wider community in order to gauge a genuine response.

All the comments above, which highlight perfectly the mood of other photography/graphic arts/publishing people I know (even if they don't write here), point to the extremely widespread dissatisfaction with this current garbage UI.

We as users are not asking much, just that your excellent software is packaged in a readable, usable interface like it used to be. In those famous words of someone else.....JUST DO IT.

The good thing is that we don't have to upgrade. PS hasn't really added anything useful since 2014, in fact they've removed things we liked since CS6.
If they see that people are doing their homework and avoiding the upgrade, it's possible they might think differently.
Once again, with software only available now as a rental, they have very little incentive to do things more carefully. Expect more of the same, I fear.

It's usable.

It's not been causing me any major problems but it's just so pointless. There isn't any science behind it, it certainly isn't "easier" to use. This is about achieving a certain look and nothing to account for improving usability. Reminiscent of first year design students who haven't learned that "looking cool" is secondary to purpose. Form over function in fine art, not interface design.

Every company has misjudged products from time to time. I'm sure Coca-Cola had all kinds of data suggesting New Coke was going to be a hit, and there probably were people who actually liked it better than the original. But in the end Coca-Cola wasn't too proud to listen to criticism or re-evaluate their decisions. If Adobe owned Coke all we would have heard is that somehow it was the aluminium can manufacturer's fault. "...it's a known issue with their cans..." or something to that effect.

OK, so the new Photoshop has a addressed one of my main beefs: things were too small on a retina screen. The menu icons appear a bit larger, and they offer the ability to make the menu font larger.

However they eliminated the white "boxes" in menu items. So the "Character" panel for example is all grey with subtle (almost invisible on a retina) underlines under active items like font size. This is HORRIBLE!!!! So hard to see where to click on a retina, especially if you work as fast as I do. Please allow users to toggle back to a regular white box view-- this provides a clear visual of where to point the cursor when plugging in values. FIX IT!!!!!

I've been using my rolled back version ever since the new interface appeared. Yesterday, I let it update to the latest revision 2015.1.2. No fix for the dreary swamp of murky low contrast yet, but I'm hopeful that somebody is listening here.

Here's a suggestion: please let us choose a "color interface highlight" mode as an alternative to the low-contrast-non-obvious highlighting of the current interface. Please make it work like Apple's dark menu mode, with a colorful highlight. It would help if this could work throughout the interface so we would have an easier time finding currently highlighted items.

Example:
Apple's implementation:


2015.1.2's current implementation:


Proposed implementation:

I can't see the form fields in the user interface now. There is no visual rhythm or hierarchy. This is just poor UI design. Adobe, please offer a mode where we can parse the user interface quickly easily again. It doesn't look cool either. Looks like garbage, works like garbage. Please fix! I've used this since Photoshop 3 in the mid 90's when the ui was just black and white, and even that was better than this.