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Comment by kjellsbells | Hacker News Reader

I cant speak for all PS users, but it's not that it is a special UX so much that it is embedded in the muscle memory of the user community, and that degree of familiarity contributes mightily to people being able to get work done quickly.

The closest example I cam think of, which people inside Adobe most certainly know about, is the failed attempts by Quark Xpress to update their product in the late 90s/early 00s, which led to them losing a 95% market share position to Adobe InDesign. You do not mess with the tools that a loud and creative community rely upon to get their jobs done.

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is the failed attempts by Quark Xpress to update their product in the late 90s/early 00s

There were a number of factors here - outsourcing engineering leading to a disastrously buggy 4.0, then failing to move to OS X for years after the market was ready to, hostile and arrogant approach to customers ("where else will they go?") and finally the misbegotten attempt to turn a DTP app into a web design tool. InDesign 1 was fairly clunky, but everyone was desperate to escape.

It's an Amiga-like shambles of mismanagement that wasted an early lead; I am still nostalgic for both tbh.

I don't know if I agree about InDesign being clunky.

The problem was everybody liked PageMaker7 and nobody wanted something new.

How about Audacity? The clowns simply bought CoolEdit and renamed it. Very innovative.

Whoops I meant Adobe Audition=CoolEditPro

Audacious.

Adobe actually changed a bunch of shortcuts at least a couple of points between photoshop 7 and creative cloud. I remember how I'd developed muscle memory that took a bit to fully overwrite.

There are settings to revert them all

Yeah but I wanted to maintain "compatibility" with others using the software whether for discussion's sake or so I can hop on their workstation and not have to think about changing anything. Turning those legacy settings on and having that survive restarts could be flaky/buggy. I got the impression keeping that functionality well tested wasn't the highest thing on their development priorities.

Adobe needs an easier and broader “settings” in the cloud. It should be as easy as login in to have your completely bespoke Photoshop greeting you.

Slightly different experience, but logged into my friends Google TV the other day and it had all my apps and I was correctly signed into everything, background and screensaver all set up. Very smooth experience.

The only way Adobe can get out of this conundrum is by announcing a transition to a new interface, finding ways to incentivize schools to teach the new interface, while keeping the old one around for as long as possible to give time for the oldies to slowly retire. We're talking decades.

The user interface is extremely customizable. You can have a default layout and still keep legacy ones around. You wouldn’t need to kill the legacy layout unless you are removing the cuetomizability.

Intellij are about to learn this lesson unfortunately.

Oh yes. As someone who writes a lot of Java, I once had a discussion with someone from JetBrains on Twitter about it. It boiled down to me saying "I'm simply not open to change, I like my IDE UIs the way they are right now, thank you very much" and him repeatedly not even trying to understand my point and replying "could you please try the new design and share your feedback".

It can also work the other way though on rare occasions. The Blender UI revamp had the opposite effect, it helped drew more users to the platform (although so did the addition of Cycles and later EeeVee renderers).

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