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

Chris, to save time I would humbly suggest your UI design team simply reads all these posts. As others have said before, the latest UI appears to be a change for change sake, with no advantage whatsoever to the user...in fact it is a hindrance to workflow.

Chris, let me respectfully turn that question on its head: what specific reasons did the design team have for making the UI this way? Or was it simply change for the sake of change? Because that's what it seems like to all of us.

Interface elements such as scroll bars, buttons, fields, pop up/drop down menus, etc, come for free for developers when they program their apps using Apple's free development tools. When I hear blowback like "you don't understand how much work we've put into redesigning all this stuff" it jus makes me shake my head.

Chris, if this may comfort you and the whole Photoshop team, you're not alone in making huge mistakes in user interface design. Everybody recalls Windows Vista and Windows 8.0, right? Never widely adopted because Windows users did not want to use them.

Now let me tell you a story you perhaps already know. It is the story of Apple's Disappearing Scroll Bars Folly, of which you can still find some rotting remnants in El Capitan. This whole stupidity was born out of a desire to integrate iOS with Mac OS X.

In the summer of 2011, Apple introduced OS X Lion. Many users including myself installed it immediately, only to discover to their horror that their beloved scrolling bars had disappeared! There were numerous and frantic exchanges on Apple's Discussions that this was a Designers' Choice to "make the interface look cleaner", à la iPhone and iPad. This was stupid as a small screen's dilemmas have nothing to do with a big monitor.

But in their magnanimity, the guys had made a concession and had included a second choice in Preferences. It was not by default, but you could choose it: it gave you narrow scrolling bars with a pale grey, hardly visible thumb (called scroller in OS X). Of course not a single customer was happy.

But I saw through the evolution of each Apple app that many at Apple disagreed and overrode that stupid choice. Either Mail or Safari, I don't remember, came up with scrolling bars resembling very much what we have nowadays, with a grey thumb that goes dark grey if you get near the scrolling bar. We were slowly getting back in business.

Over the years, without much ado, the scrolling bars came back by default. It took a year or two before the idea of a dark thumb when you get near the scrolling bar became the norm.

In El Capitan, you can still make your scrolling bars disappear. I know of absolutely nobody using that option. It's a matter of face saving, I guess.

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Now look at what you did with your scrolling bars, at least on a Mac. Don't know why, but you overrode OS X interface for windows. Those are your own scrolling bars, and guess what? The thumbs are so pale grey that they are hardly visible! Why in the name of God is it necessary to do that?

This is just another source of vexation in this interface.

Having rolled back to the previous version, I can't give a play by play breakdown of the UI issues, but I can say that the overarching theme of my sense of alienation in 2015.10 stems from an overall degradation of intuitive interaction.

When you become proficient at something, it's very much a result of practice and familiarity. If you play the clarinet, you get good by becoming so familiar with the physical instrument that you no longer even think about the individual keys, freeing you to play efficiently and proficiently.

With Photoshop, it's no different. Us working professionals have come to expect specific visual cues and differentiations as we navigate the application. We rely on the continuity from version to version, and over the years, Photoshop has almost always delivered that continuity.

With the latest version, it's as if several keys of the clarinet have shifted position. Buttons don't act the same way. Drop down dialogs require more concentration. Things are harder to click because we don't see the target. Selected layers have taken on the visual language of previously different modes, e.g. Quick Mask.

It's no longer possible to use familiarity and intuition to utilize Photoshop's interface...one must move focus from the most important thing on the screen - the pixel image - and for the first time in several years, pay more attention to the buttons and menus than to the image.

The UI team has done a bang up job of keeping the interface fresh and relevant, and looking like an iPhone, at the extreme cost of learned, intuitive interaction and the ability to use the software out of the corner of one's eye. We must now stop and stare directly at the buttons/menus to be sure we are playing the instrument correctly.

This is profoundly preventing those of us who have become excellent players from making beautiful music.

Please keep Photoshop a professional application. You have plenty of products aimed at enthusiasts and amateurs. If that demographic wants to learn the complexities of Photoshop, by all means, they are welcome to do so. But please don't dumb it down for the Instagram/iPhone set. The interface for Photoshop should be anything but trendy. Asking imaging and design professionals to embrace the latest version of Photoshop is like asking Hollywood film editors to switch to iMovie.

You shouldn't need a detailed laundry list of what doesn't work in the new Photoshop. You should simply roll the interface back, or at the very least, offer the option. Going forward, you can strive for an interface that feels fresh, lean, and relevant, but it must maintain usability above all else. Photoshop should never win a visual design award for its UI. I feel that's what the UI team was aiming for in the latest version. They should concentrate instead on supreme usability first and foremost.

If the UI team goes back to the drawing board and nixes any element that does not respect the legacy of Photoshop and the universal language of good UI, they will realize that much of what the previous versions of Photoshop offered, from an interface standpoint, should not have been tampered with drastically.

Apple's iOS faced much of the same blowback with the introduction of iOS 7. Eventually, people got used to the changes. But not many people make a living using an iPhone. A lot of people make a living using Photoshop. The new Photoshop UI seems to come from designers more interested in being "current", based on an irrelevant metric set by the ubiquity of cell phone interfaces, than in actually being usable. An Apple designed cell phone, made for the masses, has that luxury. Professional imaging software does and should not.

That is a pretty good start. But you could provide a few more specifics about why the new sliders don't work well, and why the buttons are causing you problems.

Bruce - no, that is not specific, nor something that we can discuss with our XD team. We really need specific issues.

I have either white-on-dark or black-on-light unless things are disabled then they're gray. This is on Windows 10 on a 1680x1050-res monitor. Maybe a much higher-res monitor is harder to read if the anti-aliasing is too strong and the text isn't crisp.

Personally I don't feel comfortable (as many others have also said) with the whole gray on gray look. My entire PS workflow has slowed down as I now have to squint to read almost everything. Toolbar boxes have become underscore lines, as one example, and many other items are almost illegible. Not happy.

Chris, here is one specific issue: The ENTIRE new interface. Seriously just allow us to wind back to the original OS based interface instead of this current confusing barely legible abomination. None of us are against moving forward with the times but this stupid UI is 20 steps backwards. I'm still struggling to believe the world's premier image processing and publishing software company really thought this UI would be even ok with users. It is actually terrible.