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

The previous slider code used to handle all those cases. I think this is just a bug that slipped by.

This subtle difference between the two types of sliders is meant to help the user to understand that this slider isn't like the other slider and to pay attention to the values it sets, as setting it 50% of the way doesn't mean the value will be 50. Gamma correction for example goes from 9.99 to 0.01 with the 50% mark being 1.00. This is important stuff and the UI is helping you to distinguish it.

Unless, you will drag an indicator into its extreme position you can't tell the different between two sliders. So I don't think that this decision helps anybody to distinguish between them. The way I see it is that the horizontal strip describes all possible values and an indicator allows you to pick one of these values. So the indicator should go to the very end of the strip. If the UI designers think that the slider is not meant for precise positioning than maybe the indicator should be a circle instead of arrow. But in Photoshop everything should be about precision since it is a professional tool. That is my opinion.

Marcel Slamka

I've noticed that in Photoshop v2015.1.1 different sliders have different extreme positions (i.e. locations of an indicator):

Layer Opacity: Center of the indicator does not go to the end of the strip.

Brightness: Center of the indicator goes to the end of the strip.

I've been heavily critical of the design teams' choices in this thread, but I am willing to defend this.

This is done purposefully as it gives context to the user. The first is a pop-out that is meant to be temporary, and conveys that it gives you a range of 0-100. It only exists for the moment you are using it and then disappears.

The second is a more permanent dialog it conveys to me that this slider is not a "0-100" slider, but could be any arbitrary numbers, especially negative, as most of the adjustment layer sliders are center weighted allowing for positive or negative values. But more so, this second style allows for more specialized types of sliders, such as threshhold:



Context of purpose through conveyance and affordance in UI is often a difficult to recognize act. This subtle difference between the two types of sliders is meant to help the user to understand that this slider isn't like the other slider and to pay attention to the values it sets, as setting it 50% of the way doesn't mean the value will be 50. Gamma correction for example goes from 9.99 to 0.01 with the 50% mark being 1.00. This is important stuff and the UI is helping you to distinguish it.

In either case, the indicator can be moved about 1 px more to the left than to the right.

That's because raster triangles at small resolutions are nearly impossible to center. I'm not surprised one of them is off by a pixel. A special case could be made in the code to compensate for this, but from an engineering standpoint, if this slider is reusing a shared component (and why wouldn't it, it's a slider), this may be more difficult than you'd think.

Oops, looks like the UI engineers missed some details on those sliders.

I've noticed that in Photoshop v2015.1.1 different sliders have different extreme positions (i.e. locations of an indicator):

Layer Opacity:

(center of the indicator does not go up to the end/beginning of the horizontal strip)

Brightness:

(center of the indicator goes to the end/beginning of the horizontal strip)

In either case, the indicator can be moved about 1 px more to the left than to the right.

I agree generally, but designing UX for Phone apps is also complicated, there is no toy about them.

Let's not denigrate great UX design; just what we have with the new Photoshop UI.

As ever the best way to give feedback is through concrete (also grey, you note!) examples and plenty of screenshots! 🙂

Your comments are on-target on all points.

Now that we we learn more about the team which was responsible for this atrocious UI, I have to wonder how on earth people with such limited experience of both computer UX (as opposed to iPhone toy apps.) and of the professional imaging and Print industries were allowed to go anywhere near Adobe's CC Professional Programs.

Whoever allowed this lunacy to proceed owes a huge apology to all of Adobe's Professional customers because you have reduced our productivity-levels by 50%.

Some rapid internal re-assignment of jobs at Adobe seems to be imperative.

Very well said Jared.

Bob Laughton:

"Tabs are 28px in height, which I felt were large enough to be touch friendly while retaining pleasing proportions" says Seth.

I'm sorry, but where does all this ridiculous "touch" nonsense keep coming from? Are they meaning a metaphorical touch with a mouse/Wacom pointer or do they actually think that pro Photoshop users are doing their retouching work on a bloody iPhone?

This gets more bizarre by the day.

With the ubiquity of tablets, many laptops are implementing touchscreens. This has been happening for over 5 years on desktops and laptops in the windows landscape and has more recently hit critical mass due to Windows 8 RT and Windows 10. There have been "talks" of iMacs and MacBooks eventually implementing touch screens as well. And with the implementation of more and more features that seem to originate from iOS being put into OSX, it's no surprise people would make that assumption.

This could be Photoshop making sure that those on devices that have touch screens can have a more holistic experience. And that's not a bad thing. Their execution of it is though. The UX patterns they're using are correct for devices that are not used by professionals or don't have access to standard peripherals (such as Mouse, Keyboard, Wacom). If you are designing solely for a device with touch, some of these patterns they're implementing make sense.

I feel like early in the process someone would have said "Why don't we just have an option in the UI settings to switch to a touch-friendly interface" and they were shot down saying "No, people should be able to easily and fluidly transition back and forth in their workflow the way we can choose at any moment to use the mouse or a keyboard shortcut". Neither side is wrong, but both could benefit from a bit of a compromise.

That said. We're talking about mostly a technical overhaul. Things like the height of an element being changed to allow easier touch access has nothing to do with the horrendous new iconography, or the poor contrast in 2 of the 4 themes, or the unprecedented lack of affordance on UI elements that have had them for decades, the removal of clickable surface areas that explicitly go against Fitts' Law, etc. None of these aesthetic changes make any difference to a technical improvement. But they do hinder the users. They add an unneeded learning curve and require a higher level of focus to do basic interactions. They consistently slow down all users both advanced and novice.

This is a monumental failure of interaction design caused by a fundamental lack of understanding users and the history of the medium. I'm not against change, I seek it out, but only because it's how we improve things. This is not an improvement. I'm not one requesting that we make everything look like it did in the last version, a change to something different that is an improvement from the last version is what I truly seek, but for the time being an option for "classic" mode would at the very least make the software usable again.

"Tabs are 28px in height, which I felt were large enough to be touch friendly while retaining pleasing proportions" says Seth.

I'm sorry, but where does all this ridiculous "touch" nonsense keep coming from? Are they meaning a metaphorical touch with a mouse/Wacom pointer or do they actually think that pro Photoshop users are doing their retouching work on a bloody iPhone?

This gets more bizarre by the day.