"I think pretty much any software has a personality," says Mark Hamburg, "but a lot of times it’s something that one sort of stumbles into, and people don’t think about that as part of the design process. When I started the project, I wanted to do something that was more visually interesting, for example, than Photoshop, and tried some directions in that regard. And I did bad KPT imitations."
Mark sat down with Lightroom UI designer Phil Clevenger, user researcher Grace Kim, and photography evangelist George Jardine on Dec. 11th. George writes,
In this podcast, we take a retrospective look at the entire design process of Shadowland, and how personality played a role in the final look and feel of the software. Phil discusses the efforts that went into designing Shadowland to help keep your photography the focus of attention, and visually more important on the screen than the user interface.
"I think the exercise really brought to light people’s implicit assumptions about what they thought the Shadowland personality was, or should be. Things that were kind of hard to articulate, but people just had them as working assumptions." – Grace Kim
"While people in different parts of the country may have different notions of what sleek or stylish may mean, I think everybody knows what butter is." – Phil "Butter" Clevenger
The podcast is available as an MP3 file via George’s iDisk (under "1211 Podcast – Phil Clevenger, Grace Kim and Mark Hamburg"). It’ll also be available via the Lightroom podcasts RSS feed, and by searching for "Lightroom" in iTunes.
so why can’t photoshop have a ui with some attitude? same old boring old apple classic ui for years. i find myself just staring at the lightroom ui in appreciation. best…skip
[We’ve freshened the UI in CS3, but a lot of our cycles went into revising the plumbing to set the stage to enable more aggressive departures in the future, if/when those make sense. –J.]
Hopefully you’ll still read this, but I am having zero luck downloading this episode from iTunes. I keep getting “could not be found on the server” errors. Every other episode works (trust me, I’ve got em)… Any idea what might be wrong?
[I don’t know, but I’ll ask. Thanks for the info. –J.]
Hi Colin, Yes, there does seem to be a problem. I’ll look into that. In the mean time, you can always get it from my iDisk. Links are above in John’s blog entry.