Full disclosure: I am a UX dweeb and have been since the earliest days of personal computing. (I still regard the first edition of Alan Cooper's "About Face" as the bible of usability, and have a website devoted to the usability of medical software.)
"Beware of what you ask for." I have long bemoaned the cluttered and anti-intuitive Acrobat and Reader interfaces. So I applaud the decision to, in 2023, launch a new, more streamlined interface. Have you ever heard "Never buy software that is version 1.0?" And yes, I have done a bunch of alpha and beta testing, and that's why I figure anyone who buys 1.0 software needs to realize that they're signing up to be beta testers..
I hereby dub the new Acrobat/Reader interface "New Acrobat 1.0." It has a lot going for it. But… one of the problems with this interface is poor discoverabilty of basic functions. I'm not going to go into details, but I suspect others using New Acrobat 1.0 will agree, and eagerly await New Acrobat 1.1.
The purpose of this post is simple. I am currently single-authoring a 500+ page textbook using PDF as an e-reader format, using Adobe's own InDesign. (Silly of me perhaps.) One of the great features of this textbook that comes from being a single-author textbook (though with 100 or so reviewer/contributors) is that I can have lots and lots of underlined links to other places in the textbook, at least within the four separate volumes. ("Cross-references" in InDesignese.)
So, people need a method to go to the link destination that is both discoverable and memorable., and preferably fits with their experience with other navigation methods on the Internet. Blue underlined text is a standard – Cooper says "follow standards" – that fits this perfectly. InDesign > PDF does this great! All is well.
But after using their mouse to click on a link, readers need a way to use their mouse to go back to where they were reading before. Note I said CLICK WITH THEIR MOUSE. As Alan Cooper observed years ago, you don't want to demand that people switch input modes, for example, switching from mouse to keyboard.
But, you say, all they have to do is press Alt+left-arrow! Is that discoverable? Is that memorable? Is that doable with a mouse click? No to all. So, at least for this use case (and what better use case for Reader than "reading"?) there needs to be a button that is in-your face, or the user can set to be in-your-face.
I have spent an hour or two with New Acrobat 1.0 trying to figure out how to enable this, and have failed. That may just be a problem with New Acrobat 1.0's discoverability, in which case maybe someone on this forum can tell me how to do it. In Old Acrobat, it was go through the menu and click on "Show All Page Navigation Tools."
However, I simply can't find anything equivalent in New Acrobat 1.0. I want to tell users of this textbook how to show that "Previous View" button. All is not well.
Thanks for any enlightenment.
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