Today I learned: The bar for the UX team at Adobe is 10 times lower than I expected.
Here is what happened to me.
For many many years, I was oppressed by the dictatorship of the Creative Cloud app that runs on all the machines I have used despite my well. An application. That I have never ever downloaded, but today I decided to take action about it, I decided to standup against this aggression and went through the app to uncheck the startup at login thing, because how come I never did this before? When I clicked the menu, I remembered why I never did it before, because the app doesn’t have a Preferences page, of course, every app in the world has preferences, but when you have subzero bar UX team like Adobe, you never hear of the term Mental Model, I understand, the team obviously live in a dictatorship and are all contributing to the fascist regime of Adobe.
So I went online to search how to do this, and I found many pages on Google discussing the very same thing, I’m not alone then, one of the pages stood out, from the Adobe Community, a post written 7 years ago asking this, bingo! I start reading, a genius from the genius Adobe team comes in with the obvious answer, Preferences -> General Tab -> Settings and uncheck "Launch at Login" option, of course, this doesn’t exist and people were asking why doesn’t this thing exist. It was so interesting to see the comments on this post year after year during the past 7 years complaining about the same thing, for the love of god, four pages long discussion about disabling an app auto-startup, not to mention the several discussions on the right side of the page under Related Conversations talking about the same thing, little did they know the dictatorship regime of Adobe doesn’t comprehend foreign concepts like listening to the customers. Then one of the contributors to the thread has a unique ability of dramatically reducing his IQ by 99% and think like an Adobe a Principal UX designer, *lightning*, YOU HAVE TO SIGN IN TO YOUR ACCOUNT in order to stop it from automatically running on startup (The thing you didn’t decide anyway).
With this emotional investment, I thought, let’s give it a shot, I try to sign in, I don’t remember my password, of course I wouldn’t, how many times does a non-designer person sign in to Adobe? 2.6 times in a lifetime? I did a password reset, which required a verification through SMS that was sent to my old phone number, after enabling the old SIM card, I received the message, set a new password, went back to the app and signed in.
If the biggest fascist and dictator in the world designed an app, the flow will be: Sign in, Get Signed in. But for Adobe, these weird concepts never apply, I mean, why would you sign in a customer when they sign in, it is pretty obvious that the flow should be Sign in, automatically download the new version, automatically install the new version, during both steps the customer is not allowed to abort or exit, then sign the customer in, that’s how we roll, man!
Lose a fight, win the battle, I hoped so at least, I left it doing what it wanted to do and continued using my other software, then, Adobe Creative Cloud takes over the focus of my cursor and I start hearing error warning sounds because the focus shifted from MS Word to Creative Cloud while I was typing. I went to creative cloud and disabled the option of automatically starting up.
You can notice my pragmatism, I didn’t even consider uninstalling it, I understood that having it or not having it on my machine is not controlled by my will.
Kudos Adobe team, you’re a living example that you can have a subzero UX and yet have people using your software. I really hope that you find it in your heart and will to take initiative and fast forward your clock 300 years and finally land in the year 2000.
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