4 Replies Latest reply: Mar 17, 2010 2:44 AM by Michel Bozgounov RSS

    CS5/CS4 GUI User Interface Design

    AdamZ1977 Community Member

      I have always been very unimpressed with the user interface design on Adobe CS4.  It's riddled with problems and changes that make no sense and offer no advantages.

       

      For example, there is no longer a normal Windows title bar in many of the CS4 apps.  This makes it much more difficult to maximize/restore applications since normally a Windows user could simply throw the mouse to the top edge of the screen and double click the title bar.  In fact, doing this with CS4 apps has ZERO function (it doesn't do anything).  One would think that by moving the menu commands to the top bar of the window chrome, Adobe would make these menus accessible from the top-most edge of the screen in order to increase usability.  Unfortunately this is not so and clicking the top most edge of a maximized window does nothing.

       

      Two other very important parts of an application user interface are the upper left and upper right corners.  Normally when a Windows application is maximized, throwing your pointer to the upper right corner and clicking will close the application.  Throwing the pointer to the upper left corner and clicking will reveal the application window menu.  This happens in ALL applications... EXCEPT for Adobe CS4 programs.  These two extremely important application window command locations have been completely disabled in Adobe CS4 apps. Clicking the upper most corner pixels in a maximized Adobe CS4 app does nothing.

       

      Then there's the tabbed document window interface.  If you float a document window and maximize that, normally you would expect it to become maximized within the application window as it should.  Au contraire, in Adobe CS4, the document window maximizes itself ON TOP OF the application window, thus obscuring and disabling any access to the application window's tools/commands.  I did report that as a bug during beta, but obviously it was ignored.  Seems kind of obvious to me that the fact that a user could accidentally make the entire application completely unusable by maximizing a document window might be a problem.

       

      It still alludes me as to why Adobe changed the CS4 user interface to something that breaks so many Windows UI conventions.  Adobe CS3 was a practically perfect user interface design on Windows.  It was very customizable, all of the normal Windows functions were properly in place.

       

      What's the deal with the change?

      I thought maybe the file menu was moved in place of the title bar in order to make more room for other UI elements, but it's actually pretty much the same size as the old file menu title bar combination in CS3.

      With all these changes and with all the functionality losses, what exactly have we gained in the CS4 GUI?  Seriously, I'm asking.

       

       

      Anyway, I hope Adobe starts reading the Windows User Experience Guidelines (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511331.aspx) and brings CS5 back to the way a Windows application should behave.  Proper theme adherence would be nice too.

       

      Which brings me to Windows 7.  I love love love the way Windows 7 groups application document previews in one taskbar icon and allows aero-peek for open windows.  Adobe CS 4 obviously does not support this since it does not have normal document windows.  I hope CS5 does because it is a great feature.  I also hope Adobe CS5 implements the Windows 7 jumplists and maybe even a more touch/multi-touch friendly interface.  I've become pretty good at processing photos in Bridge using the touchscreen, and it's very cool, but it could use some improvements.

       

      For an example of great user interface design, has anyone tried Office 2010 on Windows 7 yet?  http://www.istartedsomething.com/20090512/screencaps-office-2010-technical-preview-teched- 2009-keynote/

      The faded transparent title bar and tabbed ribbon interface is absolutely gorgeous.