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

Hello Jeff-- thank you for taking the time to reply. I look forward to the update and hopefully the improvement. You may detect an undercurrent of frustration in my emails-- I have suggested numerous simple improvements to your software only to have your developers reply that it couldn't be done.Yet amateur coders have simple shortcodes and hacks that accomplish these fixes. Your team should be more than happy that people who have used the software since beta 20+ years ago, are seeing things with a long-term perspective and take their time to point out improvements. I encourage your team to try and innovate and listen to their base of users, or risk going the way of Microsoft.

Super, nice to see we're finally making some good progress!

Can't wait to try it. Thanks, very much for staying with this, Jeff.

Hi Martial,

We just fixed this and gave the latest version of Photoshop to our prerelease team for feedback. This will be fixed in the next version of Photoshop.

Thanks,
Jeff

Hi Philip and everyone,

Myself and members of the Photoshop read this thread every day. I have replied with a specific list of things that we are fixing. I then updated that list with even more things that we are looking at. This work was done based on feedback from customers on this thread and via direct phone conversations with other customers.

Just today, our internal prerelease team received the latest build where we have improved in 4 ways.
1) We added a user preference to change the highlight color from grey to blue. 
2) Increased contrasts of the lightest 3 color stops.
3) Edit controls and popup/edit controls now have frames instead of underlines
4) Character panel is cleaner, divider lines removed for easier visibility

Thanks,
Jeff

Dear Adobe,

You created this online community for our input, but I really don't think anyone at your offices is actually reading or listening to our comments. I was part of a similar thread about this topic that to date has literally hundreds of comments about the poor user interface and contrast in the new version of Photoshop. That thread did not receive a single reply from Adobe.

As someone over age 40, with eyes that focus on your software all day, the new "look" of Photoshop is absolutely unusable and a step backwards. In addition, you still have offered a larger icon set and text/menu fonts for those on a retina screen. That is a simple fix and your party line is "change your monitors resolution". If my shoe doesn't fit, I don't change the size of my foot. 

I am writing this thread with the hop you will ADDRESS our concern and FIX the interface and restore it to it's somewhat legible previous version. You have a monopoly on design software and are starting to behave like Microsoft. And look where they are now...

Yes, I'm constantly looking for the field input areas now that they have been reduced to faint underlines, which is reducing my productivity. It's obvious that they have a management directive to push this poorly executed UI fad despite what long-time professionals want or need. The problem always lies at the top with these sorts of things in the corporate world.

I was using CS6 side by side with CC2015.5 yesterday and the UI difference is striking. The older UI is so much more usable, especially when working quickly. I even remember complaining that CS6 had less UI contrast than CS5 at the time. Please get away from this flat UI fad and give your real users (not your marketing target group) what we need to work. Its obvious that you are really stumbling about with it.

Just moved to the new interface.
I agree with the comments. Huge visibility pb especially with "the  background of the dropdown boxes and input fields is the same color as the background of the UI panel itself and there are no borders separating the area distinguishing what can and cannot be clicked on". 
So painful for the eyes.

Until or unless Photoshop reverts to using OS-standard UI widgets for buttons, checkboxes, etc., I'll be staying with Photoshop 2014 for as long as I can. I'm on Mac OS - I don't need Photoshop to have a UI optimized for touch.