Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomkarlo | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone really think Photoshop is a good UX for mass consumption (which is obviously the target for Gmail)? I've been using it since version 2, and I think it's a great product, but for new users it's a miserably difficult product to learn, especially for any kind of casual use.

There's a reason why users love apps like Draw Something or (more relevantly) Instagram or Paper. They're able to easily achieve the results they want without investing a huge amount of time in learning the software. Why is that so hard to understand? Not everyone wants to invest 40+ hours in learning Photoshop.

View on HN

I spend a vast amount of time every day in Photoshop and Illustrator. I got bored with uploading screenshots some time ago, but here's a small collection of my day-to-day interactions with the software.

http://bad-adobe.tumblr.com/

This is actually pretty entertaining. I always thought of the Photoshop interface to "alright", but I may reconsider my position.

Nobody thinks Photoshop has a good UX, but that's not the point; the point is it's been consistent, with only small, helpful changes.

If Adobe redesigned the Photoshop interface they'd instantly love half their market share, as people using software professionally don't like or have the time to learn something new just because it's better in some odd way.

Microsoft did that with Office, the whole Ribbon fiasco, but to their defense: - Office 2003's UI was extremely complicated; GMail's new extra steps are nothing in comparison. - The Ribbon UI was well designed from the start. - All (or most) keyboard shortcuts stayed the same. - Microsoft actually did extensively test the new design and, being Microsoft, it will be supported for a long time.

Adobe probably wouldn't be able to pull that off, and it looks like even Google can't anymore.

Yes, but Photoshop has a totally different target market from Gmail, which is why the article's comparison is nonsensical if not entirely wrong.

Gmail is designed for everyone and has to support the full spectrum of users, in particular the new ones (because they're the ones picking new email accounts - consider that they're partially trying to target people who still don't have email). Photoshop is designed for a very select set of power users. Saying Gmail's interface is becoming less like Photoshop and that's bad makes no sense at all.

You probably wouldn't recommend Photoshop to your Grandma - you'd tell her to use Picasa or iPhoto, both of which I suspect have far more users.

If your point is that his analogy wasn't great, I think we'll all concede that point.

Well, my point was that the analogy shows the problem with the rest of the post - he's applying a faulty standard to judging if the changes are good ones or not.

If it's just griping that he doesn't like the changes, fine, but if his point is that these are bad changes that don't make sense for the product, then he needs to pick a better analogy.

Everyone wants simpler, more intuitive products, unless it disrupts their particular workflow. http://xkcd.com/1172/

I think despite the weak analogy, his point is obviously valid and solid. Gmail has gotten shittier for everyone.

That's a pretty broad statement. It seems like what he's written is that it's gotten worse for someone with his use cases, which I'm not arguing (and I fall in that camp.) But we're also not representative of the average email user, which we sometimes have a tendency to forget when judging product changes.

@tomkarlo

Photoshop is extremely customisable and full-featured which is what I was getting at. Draw Something is fun and light which works well as a mobile app.

I don't know about the average email user but after 10,000+ hours of using email, I feel like I'm pretty proficient at email :)

Understood... but all your points are about the negatives of that, and none are about the positives.

It's pretty easy to come up with a bunch of arbitrary gripes about any major UX change. But you haven't made any effort to contemplate why these changes might make a lot of sense.

For example, you're complaining about the need to do two clicks to make a link, but it seems to me that 90% of the time people just paste in a URL and gmail deals with it properly. Separately entering a link and URL is more like writing HTML and I don't expect regular users do that... and frankly, I'd rather just have the URL anyway. If you knew that users were only using the "add link" icon maybe 1% of the time, wouldn't you move it down a level as well? Or just get rid of it?

I'm a super, super heavy Gmail user - I average ~6,000 emails a month received on my work account, and a smaller but similar flow on my personal gmail. I know and use the keyboard shortcuts. I generally find the mole and the new text formatting UX a bit annoying - but from a product usability perspective - not a design perspective - I can see why they make a lot of sense.

Well we all know gmail is great that's why we use it so I didn't want to convert the converted.

It's just I'd like my gmail web app to be more full featured. We can make it chat-like for mobile. I'm glad you're not encumbered by it though.

The line between mobile and desktop is rapidly blurring into irrelevance at this point... I'd guess gmail is used from mobile more than desktop at this point, and "mobile" devices are starting to look more and more like "desktops" when it comes to things like tablets, Android laptops (more of which are reportedly coming from the major OEMs over the next few months) and the Surface.

Expect to see more web services looking more like mobile, because while it used to be they were primarily web sites with mobile access, they're turning into mobile apps with some desktop web access. Installed base on PC vs. mobile should cross over this year, and usage trend is already ahead of that for lots of services.

>Gmail is designed for everyone and has to support the full spectrum of users, in particular the new ones (because they're the ones picking new email accounts - consider that they're partially trying to target people who still don't have email).

If anything, the new Gmail with all the hiding and obfuscation going on is going affect the new users the most. The other users atleast know that something is possible and will hunt around for an option, but the new folks automatically assume that some things are just not possible. For example, editing subject when replying or forwarding.

You're assuming that most users want to edit the subject of ongoing threads (and thereby break the thread.) I have my doubts it even occurs to most them. So not having that option visible makes sense. I understand what you're saying about hidden options being unknown, but generally overall cognitive load is one of the biggest issues for new users and one of the best ways to mitigate that is to remove visual complexity.

Changing the subject should not break the thread. Thread displays should be generated by creating a tree out of References mail headers.

That's another bug in Gmail. If I send two emails to two different people titled "Proposal" they get threaded. Thanks Gmail!

But the Photoshop interface did change dramatically with CS, Au least more substantially than gmail ever has.

What exactly about Office 2003's interface was "extremely complicated"? It's been nothing but intuitive and helpful to me. The new versions of Office aren't hard to figure out either, though.

I haven't used Office in any significant way since the Ribbon. It was basically the final nail in the coffin for me. Even now, when I have to use a word processor or spreadsheet, I can easily find my way around LibreOffice menus, while Office's Ribbon is confounding every time.

Does anyone really think Photoshop is a good UX for mass consumption

Obviously not. I just wish Gmail would work more like The GIMP.

I have gimp love, I really do.

but I do not agree with your statement.

> for new users it's a miserably difficult product to learn, especially for any kind of casual use.

.. means the UX is bad. Just because it's an advanced tool doesn't mean it needs to be unreasonably difficult to wrap your head around. Pixelmator isn't as powerful, but the UX for most of what it does far exceeds Photoshop's similar features.

Discoverability != usability. Products designed for casual, first-time users must be discoverable (= it's easy to figure out how to do things), while tools for professionals repeating a workflow over and over must be usable (= fast to do what you want). Photoshop is usable but not discoverable, Gmail has to be both and it's a fine line to walk.

I think we all wish Gmail was just more like Gmail. The arguably redesigned email client UX. Compare it to itself!

I think older versions were more consistent. The newer ones show tacked-on ideas. I'm sticking with V6, despite its age and incompleteness.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com