Adobe approaches design the way Stephen Miller approaches D. C. area prostitutes, with insidious rage and murderous intent.
I want you to imagine for a moment that you are a wedding photographer. You make a decent living by hustling the summers and falls. You bust your back during the nicest time of the year and forfeit precious weekends. You deal with a fair share of obstacles like rude clients (bridezilla), mothers of rude clients (bride… motherzilla?), drunk people and annoying children (two sides of the same coin), odd venues, distant locations, and the list goes on. You also deal with people who think you make too much for a living.
You come home after a long day and maybe you forget to backup that days photos for whatever reason. You hop into Adobe Lightroom and start editing. After several long hours, you’ve set your rejected photos and rated the others. Maybe you have a slow computer or happen to be short on disc space, maybe the software is lagging because of all of the photos, so you decide to delete the rejects to tidy up. If you deal with high resolution files, this may take a while, so you decide to let it run and leave for a bit.
When you return, you hit one of the same three looking flags to toggle out of the rejected photos and into the good photos, to find that there are 0 photos. That’s right. You permanently deleted everything. Every single image is gone. The fear rushes in like the subhuman mob during a Black Friday at Best Buy. The anger creeps in. The doubt. The double, triple, quadruple checking starts to occur. Panic sets in.
You rush to the recycle bin. Maybe you get lucky, maybe you don’t. But the recycle bin in Windows has a size limit, so it will permanently delete files once it’s reached that limit.
You rummage through the internet to find a miracle tool promising to recover anything. It doesn’t work. You just busted your butt during an honest days work and now it’s gone. Not only is your work gone, but the precious moments that only occur once in a lifetime are gone. There’s nothing left. Nada. Zip. Zero. And now it is time to throw the laptop through the window.
This has happened to wedding photographers. It has happened to hobbyists. Substitute a wedding for a beautiful vacation or graduation or fill in the blank. It’s happened to me twice.
Now you’re probably saying ‘Well Jeff, you should have backed up your photos!’ And you’d be right to some extent. But here’s the thing, sometimes we make mistakes. Here’s the other thing, that’s a terrible, god awful, worthless excuse for bad user experience. Backing up photos requires time, money and effort. Photography is hard enough, placing more cognitive load and stress on photographers isn’t ideal. As designers, it is our job to think so that others don’t have to.
I’ve often joked that bad UX kills because I love hyperbolic irony and deadpan dry humor and it mildly annoys my boss (which makes me happy). Luckily it isn’t true. You could argue that Three Mile Island or self driving cars can be examples but I digress. For now the aforementioned scenario and others like it is as bad as it gets.
And you know what? That’s bad enough. Losing precious moments in someone’s life is not to be taken lightly.
The product teams at Adobe are at fault for this. They are monsters. I’m not kidding. They’ve come to dominate creative software, often leaving many designers without a choice. Instead of improving their experiences, they actively decide to make them worse with each passing year.
Their software are massive behemoths requiring computing power that has yet to exist, bloated memory hogs, bathed in low contrast interfaces, peppered with inane and indiscernible icons, and buttons that require fighter pilot like vision and precision to navigate. What doesn’t Photoshop attempt to do these days? With each passing year the leviathan grows. We’re only a few versions away from it attempting to do my taxes.
I’m just going to rip through some more analogies…
Photoshop is starting to resemble the taco bell menu, they were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should. Photoshop is like that time in high school when all you could steal from your parents was scotch, gin, vermouth and half a Kool aid. Photoshop is like a Swiss army knife if a Swiss army knife weighed 80lbs.
Running their products is like watching Russian dash cam videos, you know what’s coming and the crashes are spectacular. Not one product has a shared experience, even tools with the same names behave differently. The lack of consistency is mind boggling. You’ll know this if you’ve ever used the pen tool in Photoshop and Illustrator. The color pickers are all different too (The InDesign color picker is particularly evil). Why? Because why the hell not.
It would be a fun exercise to rank all of their worst features. If I were a betting man, Lightroom’s film strip would be the heavy favorite (Which is the inspiration for this love letter).
I’m sure some of these issues are configurable. It’s probably real simple too.
Edit > Preferences or I dunno maybe Settings… > Wait two minutes > General Tab > click the Choose button > Answer a trolls riddle > Configure Film Strip > Scroll to the bottom > Uncheck the 17th checkbox
Cool.
Their philosophy is sinister and cynical. It’s like Joker meets meets shruggy:
Some men just want to watch the world burn.
+
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
All of their design decisions make sense, if you’re a goddamn psychopath.
It didn’t used to be this way either. I first got my hands on Adobe Photoshop 7 (I downloaded it in 6 parts from an AOL warez channel, hell yea! I’m old). That was a good piece of software and so were the subsequent versions. Somewhere in the last decade, however, Adobe decided that their products needed to do everything for everyone and also look like an unusable sci-fi UI. Photoshop doesn’t have to do everything and neither does Illustrator.
I understand that the designers are not at fault for everything here, but some simple fixes could go a long way. Lightroom could benefit from color coded flags and a check to see if a user is deleting rated or unflagged photos. That would have saved me.
Someone once floated the idea of licensure for UX designers, I thought it was silly, now not so much. My advice to Adobe designers is to stop what you are doing. Confess your sins and find a new line of work. Presumably one where you can’t harm people.
I know I’m late to the game on Adobe hate. If you’re ready to ditch ‘em (or in my case watch them burn to the ground) then there are good alternatives. My team has switched to Figma, I use SketchBook Pro to draw and paint, and I’m in the process to migrating over to Capture One for photo management. Vote with your dollars, it’ll be the only way we can slay this beast.
