Participant

Frage

Why does the UX of adobe products suck so hard?!

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
June 27, 2024
5 Antworten
4307 Ansichten

Just take a look at the following screenshot of the Illustrator UI, and PLEASE do your job or quit!

Why is this both called "appearance" but why I only have access to advanced options of strokes, and why do you throw your properties and options all over the place and not f*kn consolidate them so that I can find the bl**dy function that I am looking for all in the same place!?
I had to search on the open sea of the internet - the help community search is just weak - for 15 minutes to learn how to change the fill opacity of a simple rectangle! WHY!?! it is the most simple object around! Why do I need to look up such simple manipulations somewhere in some random dude's illustrator guides?!

I moved away from Illustrators several years now - I was very proficient user and I was always hoping it would at some point be fixed.

But no! It keeps getting worse and worse and worse. Adobe products are the anti-thesis to a good UX and, unfortunately, that a company will not survive on bad UX. But adobe proves us wrong time after time after time.

Please fix your UX! It stinks! And you know it.

J

jodmcc49

Inspiring

From the picture, I'm curious why both panels show the fill and stroke weight, but one shows the opacity at 100% and the other shows opacity at 50%.

Monika Gause

Community Expert

One is the opacity of the fill, the other is the opacity of the object.

J

jodmcc49

Inspiring

Thank you for the clarification.

J

Jo29974413yefo

Inspiring

They have to much money to care about user experience. They do care about share holder value

B

Bobby Henderson

Community Expert

For starters, user interface design is a very subjective thing. One person's idea of a good user interface might be pure garbage in the eyes of someone else. Not everyone thinks the same way or is going to go looking in the same places within an interface to find a function. Illustrator does have several stock workspaces and those workspaces can be customized a great deal.

The first version of Adobe Illustrator was released 37 years ago. Its user interface has slowly evolved through all of those years. There are many long-time users of Illustrator, people who have been using the application for 20 years or more. For better or worse many of us are used to how the application's UX is arranged. Any sudden, big changes (or "improvements") may throw off the work-flow for a lot of people and get them pretty angry. If the developers of Illustrator want to make any big changes to the user interface they have to walk a tightrope when doing so. For example, look at all the user fury that occurred when Apple released Final Cut X.

The situation is compounded by Adobe's many applications sharing a similar user interface theme. Are there things that can be improved in Illustrator's UX? Sure. But it's easier said than done.

None of Illustrator's rivals (such as CorelDRAW, Affinity Designer, Inkscape, etc) are perfect. They have their own strengths and weaknesses. I wish I could replicate the very fast/easy CorelDRAW keyboard shortcuts for object alignment/distribution within Illustrator. So far I haven't been able to do so because every "recipe" I've tried creates conflicts with a bunch of other existing keyboard shortcuts. Likewise, I wish the Bezier tool in CorelDRAW didn't suck so bad compared to Illustrator's Pen tool. Again, it's a matter of keyboard shortcuts plus a much smoother artwork preview in Illustrator.

H

HänkSchuhAutor

Participant

"For starters, user interface design is a very subjective thing. One person's idea of a good user interface might be pure garbage in the eyes of someone else."

Errr... no. With your comment you invalidate the whole field of UX research which has a proven record of improving digital and physical product design and subsequently driving business-decisions.
I work as an interaction designer for about 15 years (and a user of adobe products for 20 years), I have had my good share of usability tests in which my assumptions about how things should work were shattered and invalidated and in which we found aligned behavioural patterns among users.

I am aware of the legacy discussions in UIs of software and that you want to keep it accessible/usable for as many users as possible. I am confronted with that actually at the very moment.
Would you still like to work with an old school UI as from Windows98? I tried that a while back and my assumptions about how things should work were hardly compatible anymore. We do evolve as users in our understanding of interactions and we change in our expectations. Phone UIs are another strong example. Nokia did a great job on their hard button phones but struggled on their stylus and touch devices, of which already existed before the iPhone. Apple managed to establish quasi-standards on what should be possible with touch devices - especially multitouch. And I am sure a whole lot of people transitioned from Nokia to iPhones and they got used to it and there was no legacy. Yeah, this comparison is not that sleek as it is about a transition from one company's product to another one's company and also inbetween device classes - the point is we do evolve and are able to evolve.

But what you see above is just a sloppy UX job - both sections in the panels do have the same name but they do not offer the same options. Is that legacy or an error in the UI?

And as mentioned above I am a user for about 20 years, I saw the partial consolidation of Adobe product UIs in the early 2000s and ever since I was hopeful that they would get things on the right track.

I am so enraged about this apparently tiny mistake in the UI because the money we stick into this company does not end up with us users. The forums are full of bug reports and features that are confusing. The problem I posted before was asked about in 2017(!).

They do not care!

Think of the yearly fee we pay as a tax... would you like your state/country to use your money and put it into more oil rigs to pollute your local beach or into banks to be rescued because of mismanagement; Or would you rather have some wind power plants set up to get your electricity more sustainably to keep your habitat intact for the future or have your country invest into schools that teach kids the ethics of investment so that the chances of a financial crisis are being lowered in the future?

B

Bobby Henderson

Community Expert

"Errr... no. With your comment you invalidate the whole field of UX research which has a proven record of improving digital and physical product design and subsequently driving business-decisions."

That judgment is way overboard (as is the subject line for this discussion thread). I stand by my earlier comment. Do you expect me to believe everyone who works in user interface design thinks exactly the same way or agrees with each other 100% of the time?

I've been using Adobe Illustrator in my work for over 30 years. I have seen numerous other creative applications come and go since the late 1980's. For many years I've participated in forums like this one and others going back to the days of Usenet. A common topic is people arguing over user interface features. In the past, those discussions were often framed in app versus app comparisons, like Freehand versus Illustrator. Forum participants would complain how things were arranged in the existing UI. And then they would complain even louder when something in the UI was changed or moved as a result of an application update.

Many elements in the Adobe Illustrator user interface have wound up being stuck in place -even if it seems like those elements are in the wrong place. That has happened for multiple reasons, with the biggest reason being there is a large, established base of long-time users who are familiar with that flawed UI. Big changes to an existing UI can also "break" a lot of things, such as third party plugins.

I do not agree with the statement Adobe doesn't care. Many of their creative applications are very mature, which also means there isn't a lot of big changes they can make to a certain application without utterly disrupting the work flow of many existing users.

Generally speaking, it's easier to get an application's functions and user interface "right" when the developers are starting over from scratch. That's kind of what Adobe did when they stopped development of PageMaker in the late 1990's and shifted over to InDesign.

Srishti Bali

Community Manager

Hi @HänkSchuh

We hear you and understand your frustration. We'll certainly pass your concerns on to the relevant team. In addition, I kindly request that you share this suggestion on our UserVoice page. This will allow other users to upvote your feedback, and the more votes it receives, the higher the priority it will get for future updates.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Regards,

Srishti

L

lee_5281

Participant

InDesign is a POS. After 25 years it still crashes constantly, the UI breaks, it corrupts files. It's an amateur joke. I wish I never had to use the trash Imdesign ever again.

Doug A Roberts

Community Expert

Just use the Appearance panel. Ignore the Properties panel.

H

HänkSchuhAutor

Participant

Thanks, Doug... that's exactly the point I was trying to make.

I'm not going to continue being sarcastic below.

Tell me, how often do you feel frustrated about the UI of Illustrator? How much time does it cost you to dig into a new feature or an old one you haven't been using in several years? How much effort should it be to understand basic manipulations of shapes and colors? Do you want your tool to be an impediment to your work or to you want it to support your workflow? Do you want your tool to get your job done or do you want to do a research on how to use the tool before you get your job done?
We pay a good yearly fee to a company that does not work on improving things for you. They bloat the software with new half cooked features, even paste a toolbar right in front of your workspace for an AI-Gen for shapes and some other non-contextual tools to the effect that this leaves the impression of an old school banner obscuring the view on my work - and they do not cater to their users' needs with that money. They invest into the Adobe Marketing Cloud, probably syphoning data for their own uses, I am assuming ignoring privacy issues on the go and presenting us with tools that just suck when you need to use them a few times a year. Google did a better job on that - and their tools are mostly for free. Not to mention figma.

The outcries that went through the figma community when they announced the deal with Adobe do have their reasons.

The UX is pure frustration - and I do not see the investment that was done during the years of transition from local software to creative cloud. Those were the times when I had hope. But what I see now feels like a scam.

Monika Gause

Community Expert

You are probably using Figma day in day out and you are using all the features every time. So how hard will it be to un-learn something?

As for Illustrator: it's a professional tool. If you put in the effort to really learn how it works (and not just watch a 2:30 tutorial about the steps leading to an effect you want to get), then you'll be able to do it again and again. It's like learning to ride a bicycle.

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