From time to time we’ll recognize significant accomplishments in bad design with nominations to our Bad Design Hall of fame. The potential nominees are almost limitless and we invite Design Refugees to make their own nominations. And, just to be fair, DesignRefugee.com isn’t exempt. When we blow it, feel free to let us know.I’ve been a fan of Adobe’s user interface design since Illustrator 1.1, about twenty years ago. Designing a usable and somewhat intuitive interface for graphics programs is a daunting challenge and few have done it as well as they have. Of course the task has gotten more difficult as new features have bloated my favorite programs. Still, especially considering some of the competing interfaces from the likes of Macromedia (before the takeover) and Microsoft, Adobe remains a leader. That’s why I’m so disappointed in the palettes Adobe has inflicted on Mac users with the CS3 bersions of Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash (apparently Windows users have been suffering through something similar for a while).
Imagine you want to create a new layer in Photoshop. You head to the upper right corner of the Layers palette and click. Surprise, instead of displaying a menu, the palette disappears. That’s because Adobe has moved the minimize and close palette icons from their former location on the top left side of palettes – which happens to be their standard position for ALL Mac windows – and placed them directly above the pop-up menu icon. To make matters worse, the icons are excruciatingly small (shown here actual size and magnified 4x).I’m really trying to be more careful when activating these menus (I don’t really have any choice) but this is particularly annoying because there was no reason for the change. And, if the change was going to be made, why couldn’t Adobe have made the icons larger, added a bit of space between them, used stronger contrast or color to distinguish between the icons or all of the above? The answer, of course, is that in “standardizing” the Mac and Windows versions nobody really gave any thought to what is best for users.I’ve been at it two weeks and I still find myself making this mistake a few times a day. Given that my eyes and motor skills aren’t improving with age, I figure this “feature” will become a chronic annoyance.Is there any chance someone will write a plugin to move the close and minimize icons back where they belong or, better yet, that Adobe will undo this? Probably not but, just in case someone at Adobe is listening, here’s a reminder of how things used to be:
