Today, in the first of what will surely be a highly successful and short-lived series of rants, I’d like to talk shop about our little friend monolithic over-lord Adobe.

Adobe, we depend on you and your software to make just about everything. From art to ads, porn to … more porn. UI designers are utterly dependent on Photoshop and Illustrator to work and work well so that we can make our own websites and games and software to build a prettier world.

So you’d think that a company that creates these tools would know a thing or two about good design itself. Or at least be in touch with its consumers. You’d hope so, right?

Then what happened?

I’m not going to pretend to be an omnipotent, stuffed-pants snooty designer, but I’d like to think I know a thing or two about usability in software. Mostly because I sit in front of a computer all day and all night and if something doesn’t work well then I’m the first person to suffer from it. And the direction the CS suite is going toward points to greater and greater suffering.

Creative Suite CS3 was a wonderful collection of software. CS4 was Adobe’s Windows Vista. People avoided it like the plague. Instead of adding features that users wanted, Adobe rushed out a buggy release that included broken tools and a new interface built on proprietary UI. It was slow, irritating to use, and seen by many as simply something shiny to try and sell a new release. With such negative push-back, you’d think that Adobe would have focused its efforts on streamlining the interface and making the overall experience more elegant and functional.

Too bad they tried to fix a dozen pieces of software in about a year and ignored many of the pleas of their beta testers.

Anyway, let’s begin the bitching. Here’s Flash CS5.

Click on a text field and this is what you get. Try to find where you'd edit your filters.

Poorly mimicking After Effects - But wait a minute, Adobe owns AE... why not use the same interface?

This pane is the single most important window in the interface. It tells you everything you need to know about any object you click on. That seems like a nice feature… have a context-sensitive menu that will reduce the clutter on your screen and only show you what you want.

What if your monitor is much wider than it is tall (like most monitors as we trend toward HDTV proportions) and this menu can only be displayed vertically? Then you’re stuck in a world of constant collapsing menus and scrolling. It seems like the scroll wheel has been given a significant amount of attention in the Flash UI because not only is it required to navigate through the tiny scrolling boxes (that you cannot resize), but every single numeric field has also been mouse-wheel enabled. Which means that if you’re scrolling through a tiny box filled with mouse-wheel enabled fields, chances are you’re going to change just about every value before you actually make it down to the bottom of the list.

There’s also no way to break the individual panels out of the properties pane and many of them can only be accessed from within it. So if you wanted to edit Filters, for example, you have no choice but to click each individual object, collapse all of its other properties, then scroll to the bottom of the pane and hope that your filters box isn’t only 30 pixels tall.

Let’s talk about contextual panels for a moment here.

The beautiful Adjustment Layers panel.

Adjustment Layers Panel when a layer is clicked.

Adobe seems obsessed with the idea of making every panel as contextual as possible. Encapsulate all functionality into the smallest space possible to avoid clutter and “clean up” the interface. There are a few simple and major things wrong with that idea.

First, reducing the square footage that your tools take up is comparable to shoving everything in a drawer as opposed to using a peg-board. With a drawer, everything is nice and hidden for when your mother or interior design students come over, but if you actually need to use something, you are going to be digging around for a while. No matter how well you organize your drawer, it will still take a minimum of several steps to grab any tool you may need.

Compare this to a peg board. At first glance, the board may appear chaotic, random, and complicated. But its layout has purpose. Everything was placed where it was needed, as needed, with no waste and complete flexibility. Muscle memory is able to select a tool in the dark without much effort at all. It may not be the most compact and clean solution, but it is unquestionably the quickest.

In a professional environment what would you prefer?

Flash Font Embedding Panel. No resizing allowed?

Swatch selection. No zooming options. You have to guess what those bitmap blobs and gradients are.

To make things worse, Adobe is now forcing users to do sensitive settings manipulations within these tiny contextual boxes. For precision work you want to be given as much control as possible, and shrinking the tools does just the opposite. Plus with no pop-up adjustment dialogs, information you want is no longer being presented on the surface where you’ll always see it. You have to select what you want, then dig through all of your menus to find where it appeared.

But at least Adobe animated the interface.

Yes sir, not only are we given excessively contextually sensitive menus, scrolling boxes that we can’t read and values that change accidentally at will, but Adobe spent untold man-hours making an interface completely detached from the OS. One that is clunky and shiny and lacks the years of ergonomics and good design practices that Apple and Microsoft have built their companies on. But doing so has allowed them to animate the collapsing and expanding boxes that you now have to click on all day. And has given them “flick functionality” for flicking your Photoshop canvas to and fro when you least want to. It’s just like an iPod except this time there’s no reason at all to want to flick anything. And when you hit zoom in and out you can toggle a nicely tweened zoom animation to make resizing less painfully slow.

One can see why these choices were made at a certain level. A new interface will look shinier and tempt customers to buy the latest and greatest version of the software. Slick animations and “ultra modern features” like the flick will keep the software feeling modern. But that’s not what professionals want and that’s not what professionals need in software that determines their livelihood. All of this contextual convenience would be lapped up if the ability to view panels regardless of context still existed as an option. Allowing for multiple ways of reaching an objective is the heart of creativity, is it not? Simple users will use simple options. Advanced users need to be able to spread their wings. Up-front simplicity is only a sin if the software does not cater to those who are capable of a complex interface. The CS suite will undoubtedly gain a larger feature set over time but if the interface remains clunky these features will be too painful to use properly.

Adobe, take a cue from the people who actually use your software. There’s an entire planet of designers and developers who know a thing or two about what they need and how to achieve it. Opening an ear could keep you from eventually becoming irrelevant.