My Two Years as an Anthropologist on the Photoshop Team (2015)

As a lifelong Adobe user, I'd rather hear that Adobe is doing this kind of work at a higher level, that is, studying how users interact with all of their apps as a whole.

Instead of adding art boards to Photoshop, I'd rather see art boards in Illustrator integrated better with PS. And are the art boards in AI still exporting at non-specified dimensions (a very common bug for years)? Fix what is broken before adding features to PS that are already in AI.

Can anyone explain to me why copy/paste tools are different between AI/PS? Just make them the same!

Edit:typo

I just linked to this article in the comments on "Why I turned down $500K and shut down my startup" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11866868 As what the author did is essentially ethnography.

Ethnography is a powerful tool! Talking to your users, and more importantly seeing first hand what they are doing with what you have built can drastically change how you view your application. If you have the ability to get out there and SEE your users in action, do it! It might just change your world.

I can appreciate the need for an anthropological point of view when attempting to understand the shortcomings of a process that eluded the standard feedback loop before it, but I'd hope the findings are considered just a piece of the puzzle rather than the last resort for an entire solution.

This could do well with a [2015] in the title, please?

Not because it's old and shouldn't be (re-)posted, but to clarify that it might have been here before. I know I've seen it somewhere earlier, and my guess would be HN.

If this anthropologist used a wider scope, then the conclusion might have been that we, as a society, need less of Photoshop.

that would mean listening to the user. unthinkable! me and my co-founded knows exactly what they want.