These days I’m reminded of a Saturday Night Live bit from the ’08 campaign, featuring an exchange between Sarah Palin & Hillary Clinton:

Palin: It’s truly amazing, and I think women everywhere can agree, that no matter your politics, it’s time for a woman to make it to the White House!

Clinton: No-o-o-o!! Mine!! It’s supposed to be mine!! I’m sorry, I need to say something. I didn’t want a woman to be President! I wanted to be President, and I just happen to be a woman!

I used to joke that I was largely unemployable, that my skills and ambitions are so specific that I could work at only a handful of companies, on a handful of projects*.  Sometimes there’s not much joke to it.

I didn’t come to Adobe because I wanted to “develop software,” or “work in high tech,” or “do product management.”  I came here to make Web design software suck less.  Everything else–the working in marketing, the moving coast-to-coast three times in two years, the blogging, the whole up-at-dawn pride-swallowing siege–is just a means to that end.

Why do I mention this now? It’s a note to myself as much as anything.  I’m not working on mobile software now because I want to work on mobile software per se, or to be trendy or whatever.  I’m working on it to solve real, specific problems, and to enable myself & people I care about to express themselves in particular ways.

Would it be better to be broad rather than deep, to be an MBA who’s interested in expanding markets, vertical integration, and “the art of the deal,” instead of an unfrozen caveman Web designer with an obsessive interest in graphics software?  I don’t know; maybe I never will.

“To thine own self be true.” I’m working on it.

* The night before a big demo few years ago, I had an anxiety dream in which I was being really obnoxious to my boss. Terribly disappointed in me, she said, “Wow, you were doing so well, and now… I could make one call, and you’d be product managing FrameMaker!” It was an illuminating moment: the deep threat isn’t losing my job, it’s working on something for which I lack passion.

“People pay for features because it’s easier to justify the expense. People adore polish because it makes the product feel good, and that adoration will carry you farther in the long run than features.”
— Key Photoshop/Lightroom engineer Mark Hamburg
I was drawn to Photoshop–first to use it, and much later to help develop it–because of the high level of fit & finish I saw in the application. I’ve worked on Photoshop not because I think it’s perfect, but because I’m hung up on the imperfections. (Why work on something that’s already perfect?) At root I’m a frustrated, middling Web designer who just wanted the damn software to be better.

In talking with painter James Christensen, Photoshop engineer Jerry Harris picked up an anecdote I found interesting:

During World War II, Allied bomber losses were high, so the powers that be demanded a fix. The engineers set out to eyeball every bomber they could, gathering great statistics for each bullet hole. After a long study they decided to add more armor plating to the areas that had the highest concentrations of holes. A bit after these improved planes were deployed, they received some startling news: more planes were going down than before. At this point I thought, “Did they make them too heavy?”

Then the light bulb went on for someone: they had measured every bullet hole in every plane at their disposal, but they’d failed to realize it was the ones that they did not have access to that mattered. It was the ones that did not return that needed to be scrutinized. They needed to improve the armor in the places that the returning planes had no bullet holes.

Sounds like it might generally relate to product marketing, and user studies: go investigate the customers that don’t return for seconds, i.e. upgrade.

I can’t vouch for the story’s veracity, but the lesson seems sound. This is part of why one needs to listen to customers, but only up to a point: they’ll tell you how to please the customers you have–but not the ones you don’t have.

Stephen Colbert’s remarks on his job remind me of the process of developing Photoshop:

"We often discuss satire — the sort of thing he does and to a certain extent I do — as distillery," Mr. Colbert continued. "You have an enormous amount of material, and you have to distill it to a syrup by the end of the day. So much of it is a hewing process, chipping away at things that aren’t the point or aren’t the story or aren’t the intention. Really it’s that last couple of drops you’re distilling that makes all the difference. It isn’t that hard to get a ton of corn into a gallon of sour mash, but to get that gallon of sour mash down to that one shot of pure whiskey takes patience" as well as "discipline and focus."

 

We’ll never, ever lack good suggestions on what to do next, nor is it terribly hard to grab a wad and go work on them.  Given the vast number of customers and workflows Photoshop serves, however, it’s critical that the enhancements we make each serve a wide range of needs.  Finding the really transformative stuff–the fundamental architectural changes that’ll enable numerous other enhancements while standing the test of time–is the fun, aggravating, and ultimately rewarding part.

Stephen Colbert’s remarks on his job remind me of the process of developing Photoshop:

"We often discuss satire — the sort of thing he does and to a certain extent I do — as distillery," Mr. Colbert continued. "You have an enormous amount of material, and you have to distill it to a syrup by the end of the day. So much of it is a hewing process, chipping away at things that aren’t the point or aren’t the story or aren’t the intention. Really it’s that last couple of drops you’re distilling that makes all the difference. It isn’t that hard to get a ton of corn into a gallon of sour mash, but to get that gallon of sour mash down to that one shot of pure whiskey takes patience" as well as "discipline and focus."

 

We’ll never, ever lack good suggestions on what to do next, nor is it terribly hard to grab a wad and go work on them.  Given the vast number of customers and workflows Photoshop serves, however, it’s critical that the enhancements we make each serve a wide range of needs.  Finding the really transformative stuff–the fundamental architectural changes that’ll enable numerous other enhancements while standing the test of time–is the fun, aggravating, and ultimately rewarding part.

Shopping for strollers this weekend (oh yes, it’s getting to be that time), my wife and I found ourselves adrift amidst dozens and dozens of similar models.  Multiple cupholders, detachable Cheerio hoppers, quick-release "infant inserts," heated leather-wrapped winches with built-in fondue pots (<–okay, I only wished for that last one)–it all makes your head swim.  God, how do you make The Right Choice™?

Finally I said, "You know, if we walked in here and there were only one stroller, we’d probably say, ‘Looks great, we’ll take it.’"  And with that, we chilled out, made a choice, and walked out happy.

This is just one example of the bafflement people face on a daily basis.  Whether it’s 175 kinds of salad dressing or 6 million possible stereo combinations in a single store (both real examples), says psychologist Barry Schwartz, this "infinite choice" is paralyzing.  According to the TED Web site that hosts his entertaining and enjoyable 20-minute talk on the subject,

[It’s] exhausting to the human psyche. It leads us to set unreasonably high expectations, question our choices before we even make them, and blame our failures entirely on ourselves.

His example about buying jeans ("I want the kind that used to be the only kind!") is particularly dead-on: "All this choice enabled me to do better… but I felt worse."  Why?  Because choice raises expectations, and "With perfection the expectation, the best you can hope for is that stuff is as good as you as you expected."

I think about this issue with Photoshop all the time.  For years I’ve argued that the problem isn’t that people can’t accomplish something; it’s that they think there must be an even better way to do it, and that they’re therefore failing to achieve perfection.  Thus they can get better results while feeling worse.

So, what can we do about it?

A simple response is just to hide things, offering "simple" and "advanced" modes, or the like.  Photoshop does this in a number of places, via menu customization (try the "Basic" workspace) and More/Fewer Options buttons in dialogs like Shadow/Highlight.  The thing is, this doesn’t work all that well.  People just say "Show me everything."  Why?  Because no one wants to be the guy who drops three grand on an SLR, then leaves it in moron mode.  No one wants a Ducati with training wheels.

A better solution, I think, is to make Photoshop more task-oriented.  We need to help people bring forward what’s needed, when it’s needed, and put it away when it isn’t.  We need to emphasize best practices–showing the constellations among the stars.  The Photoshop team can’t do this on its own: we need to help users blaze their own trails, then share the solutions with others.  We group these ideas under the heading "Lighting the Way."  Instead of offering unlimited choice, or putting irritating constraints on it, we’ll work to provide just the right choices most of the time.

Finding the balance is no easy challenge, but that’s what makes it fun.
J.

Related interestingness:

• In "Challenging the Apple Archetype," Cameron Moll argues for letting people customize their user experiences.  Rather than assuming that "Father knows best," we should help people tune things to taste–within reason.  He envisions "The LEGO archetype."
• In the NYT, Janet Rae-Dupree talks about how "Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike"–and the problems that can result.  "I have a DVD remote control with 52 buttons on it," says author Chip Heath, "and every one of them is there because some engineer along the line knew how to use that button and believed I would want to use it, too."
• To dig a bit deeper into Schwartz’s ideas, see also his article "The Tyranny of Choice."

PS–I sometimes have to chuckle when people talk about the complexity of Photoshop, or any professional software for that matter.  Sometime I should post screenshots of what features look like while in development.  A dialog like Shadow/Highlight might have literally 50 or 100 control points that can be used to fine-tune the settings.  ("I’ll give you something to cry about!" ;-)) Much of the work in developing the app is to boil that complexity down to something workable–maybe four or five controls that offer the most bang for the buck.  The trick is to make things "as simple as possible, but no simpler."  ("A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.")

Shopping for strollers this weekend (oh yes, it’s getting to be that time), my wife and I found ourselves adrift amidst dozens and dozens of similar models.  Multiple cupholders, detachable Cheerio hoppers, quick-release "infant inserts," heated leather-wrapped winches with built-in fondue pots (<–okay, I only wished for that last one)–it all makes your head swim.  God, how do you make The Right Choice™?

Finally I said, "You know, if we walked in here and there were only one stroller, we’d probably say, ‘Looks great, we’ll take it.’"  And with that, we chilled out, made a choice, and walked out happy.

This is just one example of the bafflement people face on a daily basis.  Whether it’s 175 kinds of salad dressing or 6 million possible stereo combinations in a single store (both real examples), says psychologist Barry Schwartz, this "infinite choice" is paralyzing.  According to the TED Web site that hosts his entertaining and enjoyable 20-minute talk on the subject,

[It’s] exhausting to the human psyche. It leads us to set unreasonably high expectations, question our choices before we even make them, and blame our failures entirely on ourselves.

His example about buying jeans ("I want the kind that used to be the only kind!") is particularly dead-on: "All this choice enabled me to do better… but I felt worse."  Why?  Because choice raises expectations, and "With perfection the expectation, the best you can hope for is that stuff is as good as you as you expected."

I think about this issue with Photoshop all the time.  For years I’ve argued that the problem isn’t that people can’t accomplish something; it’s that they think there must be an even better way to do it, and that they’re therefore failing to achieve perfection.  Thus they can get better results while feeling worse.

So, what can we do about it?

A simple response is just to hide things, offering "simple" and "advanced" modes, or the like.  Photoshop does this in a number of places, via menu customization (try the "Basic" workspace) and More/Fewer Options buttons in dialogs like Shadow/Highlight.  The thing is, this doesn’t work all that well.  People just say "Show me everything."  Why?  Because no one wants to be the guy who drops three grand on an SLR, then leaves it in moron mode.  No one wants a Ducati with training wheels.

A better solution, I think, is to make Photoshop more task-oriented.  We need to help people bring forward what’s needed, when it’s needed, and put it away when it isn’t.  We need to emphasize best practices–showing the constellations among the stars.  The Photoshop team can’t do this on its own: we need to help users blaze their own trails, then share the solutions with others.  We group these ideas under the heading "Lighting the Way."  Instead of offering unlimited choice, or putting irritating constraints on it, we’ll work to provide just the right choices most of the time.

Finding the balance is no easy challenge, but that’s what makes it fun.
J.

Related interestingness:

• In "Challenging the Apple Archetype," Cameron Moll argues for letting people customize their user experiences.  Rather than assuming that "Father knows best," we should help people tune things to taste–within reason.  He envisions "The LEGO archetype."
• In the NYT, Janet Rae-Dupree talks about how "Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike"–and the problems that can result.  "I have a DVD remote control with 52 buttons on it," says author Chip Heath, "and every one of them is there because some engineer along the line knew how to use that button and believed I would want to use it, too."
• To dig a bit deeper into Schwartz’s ideas, see also his article "The Tyranny of Choice."

PS–I sometimes have to chuckle when people talk about the complexity of Photoshop, or any professional software for that matter.  Sometime I should post screenshots of what features look like while in development.  A dialog like Shadow/Highlight might have literally 50 or 100 control points that can be used to fine-tune the settings.  ("I’ll give you something to cry about!" ;-)) Much of the work in developing the app is to boil that complexity down to something workable–maybe four or five controls that offer the most bang for the buck.  The trick is to make things "as simple as possible, but no simpler."  ("A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.")

On December 2, 1982, John Warnock and Chuck Geschke started Adobe Systems.  Today the once-tiny maker of printer software begins the next quarter-century of its existence.

In 1993, my freshman year in college, I attended a meeting of the Notre Dame MadMacs user group.  I can’t tell you a single other thing about that evening, but I remember that they played a video (on a computer! my God!!) from a company I’d never heard of.  On screen an animation depicted a hand opening up to reveal (as I remember) an eye on its palm.  “Imagine what you can create,” read an arcing line of text above the hand.  And below, “Create what you can imagine.  Adobe.” 

And then I realized…like I was shot…Like I was shot with a diamond…a diamond bullet right through my forehead…  Okay, perhaps that’s a bit much–but I thought, “I don’t know who these guys are, but I’ve got to find out.”  Photoshop was shortly to make one hell of an impression on me, and all these years later, I can’t believe–still cannot believe–that I work here.  (Some part of me still suspects that my car drifted off the road after they cancelled LiveMotion, and that all of this is playing out in ultra slow-mo, Owl Creek Bridge-style.)

If you’re interested in the history of Adobe, check out Pamela Pfiffner’s excellent Inside the Publishing Revolution, released to coincide with the company’s 20th anniversary.  Excerpts & some fun photos (David Hockney meeting Photoshop; young Steve Jobs) are on Adobe.com.  I’d love to see an updated edition, one that includes the history of Macromedia (and the various companies that formed it) and more.

As for the future, one goal comes to my mind over and over: radically improving the user experience by radically democratizing how Photoshop* is developed, and by whom.  Instead of measuring the Photoshop team in the dozens, let’s measure it in the thousands–or the hundreds of thousands.  Let’s leverage the ol’ series of tubes, helping anyone with a good idea share it, opening the application skin to far more developers, even upending what a document can be.  Photoshop belongs to a whole lot more than one company or group of developers; it belongs to a global community of the visually expressive.  It’s this team’s job to keep anything from blocking the light.

Here’s to the future,
J.

* I’d speak on behalf of other apps, but it’s already presumptuous enough for me to speak on behalf of Photoshop.

Heh–I’m not sure why I feel compelled to pass this along, other than that it’s a nice counterpoint to the rigor & logic that we associate with computing.

Last night on a plane, I plugged my headphones into my MacBook Pro, only to see a weird red light issuing from the headphone port.  The sense that HAL 9000 was now peering out of my Mac was compounded by my just having watched Sunshine, a flick featuring a sometimes disobedient flight computer.  The really odd thing was that with this light pouring out, I lost access to my internal speakers.  Headphones in: no prob; headphones out: sounds of silence (something something, neon god they made…).

The solution, I learned from a Mac forum, boils down to “jiggle it.”  And, what do you know, after jabbing HAL in the eye repeatedly, I once again have working internal speakers.  I feel like the Fonz, smacking the jukebox into shape.  Anyway, it’s kind of funny that sometimes all this technology gets resolved with a good old-fashioned jiggle.

I have a very simple idea–one that I think could be very powerful.  I’m proposing that Photoshop (and other Adobe apps) become living organisms, platforms that constantly improve as users learn & share.  Whether the idea sees the light of day depends largely on what you say about it.

I want to start by addressing a simple problem: Let me preserve what I’ve learned & keep it at my fingertips.  If you’re like me, you’ve probably jotted down a million notes about software over the years, storing them on sticky notes, on legal pads, wherever… most of which are nowhere to be found at the moment you need them.  Instead of settling for this, what if you could capture your knowledge about Photoshop inside Photoshop?

It’s the simplest idea in the world: let’s let people jot down notes and stick them into the application itself.  Instead of living only on the local hard drive, the notes would be stored on the network.  That way, no matter where you found yourself working, your accumulated knowledge would always be there, in the context of the tools themselves.  In essence you’d be micro-blogging from within Photoshop.

Ah, but the network is built for sharing.  So what if you could elect to share your notes with others, and what if you could see what they’d shared?

Here’s a practical example.  Let’s say you go into Photoshop’s Unsharp Mask dialog box.  “Amount” is straightforward, but what the hell do “Radius” and “Threshold” mean, exactly?  Let’s say you make sense of it, or you find settings that work really well for certain images.  Why not jot down a note right there?  That way you’ve enriched Photoshop with that knowledge, in context, and made it part of your permanent collection.

But what if you don’t know what something means?  Maybe you could see what Bruce Fraser has to say on the subject–reading a note with Bruce’s tips right in the dialog.  Inside Illustrator’s Live Color feature the other day, I was dying to have Mordy Golding drop by my office and give me the straight dope.  Why couldn’t I see Mordy’s writing–or hear audio narration, or see a video, for that matter–right within Live Color?  Why can’t I see Mac Holbert’s best practices for printing–right in the print dialog?

As I envision it, notes would be searchable, and you could give a quick thumbs-up/-down, TiVo-style, to each note.  That way the good stuff would bubble up while the crap falls into obscurity.  (And, of course, you could always elect to keep your notes private–which they would be by default.)

Here’s a really simple mockup I created to depict the concept running in a palette/panel.  (Yes, it would look slicker when real UI designers did their thing.)

So, what do you think?  Would you find value in jotting down what you’ve learned, making it portable and permanent?  Would you share that info with others?  Would you read what they’d shared?  Is any of this worth a damn?  I’m dying to know your take.  Here’s a 3-question survey, and comments are welcome.

Thanks,
J.

PS–At risk of overloading the concept, I may as well confess that I regard notes as the “thin edge of the wedge.”  I want not only my knowledge to live “in the cloud”; I want everything that makes my copy of an app mine–custom palettes, brushes, swatches, font styles, everything–to live on the network, to be synched seamlessly and to be sharable with others.  If I come up with a kick-ass skin for using Photoshop for Web design, I want you to type “JNack” into your copy of Photoshop and have it, bang, zero friction.  Viva the Photoshop Nation.

I often wonder why, in the midst of working with a brilliant team on a beloved & respected product in a company that’s doing better than ever, I’m kind of a miserable bastard.  I get this insane privilege, and yet no matter how full the glass, I see only the flaws, only the things that could and should and must be made better.

I found a little solace in Paul Arden’s It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be.  Maybe, if you’re like me, you will, too:

Why do we strive for excellence when mediocrity is required?

There is little demand in the commercial world for excellence.  There is much, much bigger demand for mediocrity.

The truth is, I’m glad it’s this way.

Imagine a world where all clients were wonderful, where we could produce whatever we felt like with no restrictions, with everybody having freedom to produce all their fantasies unfettered by tedious clients.

What would we do?

We would react against it, saying, “Isn’t this boring.  How can we be dull?  Let’s do it badly, let’s make it ugly, and let’s make it really cheaply.”

That’s the nature of the creative person.  All creative people need something to rebel against.  It’s what gives their lives excitement, and it’s creative people who make the clients’ lives exciting.

Or, as George Bernard Shaw succinctly put it:

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. All progress, therefore, depends upon the unreasonable man.

Keep your head up,
J.

Mordy Golding, who spent a couple of cycles working as an Illustrator PM, has posted some perspective on how Adobe applications are created.  It’s a bit of a long read, but Mordy touches on some common questions, including:

• How does the team decide which features to build & for what markets?  For example, how is something like Flash integration weighed against something like N-color printing support?
• Why doesn’t the team have more resources to put towards various priorities?
• Why doesn’t Adobe typically add functionality in small dot releases?
• If a feature exists in one application (e.g. the OpenType palette in Illustrator, or separations in InDesign), why is it hard to move to other ones?

I’m never quite sure how much of this people outside the company will find interesting, vs. thinking "Just get it done, guys."  (I bounce between those poles myself.)

As for resources, I think a couple of points are worth making:

• Very often, products don’t get staffed in accordance with the money they bring in.  Photoshop, for example, doesn’t get anything like the number of engineers you’d expect based on revenue.  Why?  Because the revenue is needed to fund new areas of development that may not turn a profit for a while.  Years ago, I’m told, the PostScript group (then the big bread winner) resented having to fund the dinky little applications group.  Clearly, though, that was the right move for the future.  At present it can be frustrating to know that you could do Kickass/Long-Requested Feature X if you had just one or two extra bodies (very frustrating) , but that’s the nature of the biz.
• Although we all clamor for more engineers & QE folks, without whom we can’t build anything, it’s probably good that we’re constrained.  Otherwise, we’d go nuts building features, resulting in tons of complexity. That is, we’d be knocking ourselves out to serve customers, but rapid unchecked growth would probably overwhelm just about everyone.

Yesterday’s discussion of Smart Filters made me think that it’s worth writing up some thoughts on Smart Objects & the future of compositing in Photoshop in general.

I have a hypothesis, at least as regards Photoshop: flexibility generally breeds indirectness. That is, when you step away from the familiar world of applying pixel tools directly to a plane of pixels, you introduce complexity. Whether or not that complexity is worth accepting depends on bang for the buck.

Continue reading →

First, before you think I’m picking on/picking a fight with the folks at Microsoft, let me point out that the title of this post could be a sort of software Mad Libs, where “[product]” (including “Photoshop”) could replace “Word.” More on that in a second. But first, an Airing of Grievances:

Just now I double clicked a .DOC attachment sent to me in email. Entourage dutifully launched Word, and I glanced over the document, then hit Quit. Here’s where the fun begins. “Hey, your Normal template has changed,” says Word (or something to that effect); “Would you like to replace your Normal template?”
Uhh… no? (I didn’t make any changes to any template, so I probably shouldn’t replace something that sounds pretty fundamental, right?) I hit “No.”
“Okay–please choose a folder for saving the new template.”
Um, what? Again, I don’t want to save anything (since, again, I didn’t create or change anything). Hit “Cancel.”
“Hey, your Normal template has changed. Would you like to replace it?”
What? What the hell are you talking about? Fade out.

I’ve bothered to write this for a couple of reasons. One, I’m sure the process I just experienced makes sense to someone on the Word team, and it probably makes sense even to some Word power users. Heck, it probably opens up all kinds of powerful possibilities. But for a guy simply trying to open and read a file, then move on, it’s bizarre & unnerving. Just what have I done to my software, and why?
More importantly, though, it illustrates the disconnect between developers/power users & ordinary mortals just trying to get something done. Features made for one perplex the other, and once you’re an expert, it’s hard to see with a fresh perspective.
Back to the original point: you could easily substitute “Photoshop” for “Word” and cite plenty of examples that baffle newcomers. Imaging is complex, and whether it’s a color profile warning every time you open a file, or a “Do you want to maximize compatibility?” dialog every time you save (more on that soon), plenty of Photoshop functions are hardly self explanatory. Trouble is, we’ve been around the tools for too long, and we know why things are as they are. That makes it tough to see through new users’ eyes.
So, at last, my plea: If something in Photoshop (or another Adobe app) gives you a moment of “Wha…?,” please let us know, okay?
Thanks,
J.

I was chatting this morning with some guys from the Illustrator team, batting around ideas for a fairly sexy feature they’ve been considering. They were thinking, naturally and appropriately as software designers do, about how to make the feature accurate, fast, and intuitive. The product manager in me said “right on”; the designer in me said “ugh.”
The point has been made many times, but computers’ tendency towards the predicable, the literal, and the repeatable often isn’t a recipe for good design, much less good art. Yes, being able to execute each step more and more quickly lets you try more things & potentially take more risks. But doesn’t it seem that it tends strongly towards a “right” answer, producing designs that look tastefully bland? Happy accidents grow rare.
I thought of this several weeks ago during a typography session at Photoshop World Boston. The speaker listed, and hundreds of attendees dutifully scribbled down, which fonts were considered hot and which were not. I can dig that people don’t want to look foolish, but I found the whole exercise kind of repellent. I left the session wanting to make some killer design using that beaten-down, forlorn face my wife calls “the yacht club font,” which suffered death by misuse on 6,000,000 soft-focus ’70s paperback covers. Well dammit, I thought, all you trendies can go off and rock out with Eurostile (condemning it to be the Bookman Swash of the future) or whatever; I’m gonna make the yacht club fresh. I’ll do something so terrible it’s great.
So back to the point at hand: this Illustrator feature had a sort of “give me tasteful” button. Yeah, but how about “gimme awful,” I wondered. And gimme random. I mean, we’re the company that registered SmashStausQuo.com. How about we actually do it? We need more offbeat, playful, bizarre functionality–only when you want it, to be sure, but there to introduce some chance, some chaos, some creative destruction.
And I’ll bet that by willing to embrace the terrible, we all just might make something great.
J.
[Thanks to Thomas Phinney for immediately knowing the name of “that swoopy ’70s paperback font,” as I described it.]

Yeah, well, so do I. It doesn’t exist yet, of course (we just recently introduced version 9.0, a.k.a. CS2), and it won’t exist for many years. But what form will it take?

Software developers know how to do one thing really well: develop more software. We build features, and when we’re done, we build more. This isn’t inherently a bad thing. Customers have far more good ideas than we have time or resources to support, and having to choose just a fraction to implement each cycle keeps us focused on those we think really matter.

But what’s the net result of a million good features? Yep–a million little pieces, all multiplying off one another. An app like Photoshop becomes a warren of commands that are available sometimes but not others, in ways that aren’t self-explanatory (e.g. you can’t start painting on a vector text layer, or create layers in 32-bit mode). And the sheer volume of options can be overwhelming. At one point I counted 494 top-level menu items in Photoshop CS. In CS2 we’ve added roughly 60 more, and that’s not counting the new Adobe Bridge application.

So, back to the hypothetical Photoshop 15: at our present course and speed, we’d add at least 350 more menu commands. We’ll need to raise the minimum screen spec just to hold the menus! And then, you know, it’s wafer-thin mint time.

Incidentally, we’re all complicit in this–we (Adobe, or [insert other software vendor here]) and you. (If you’ve read this far, you’re interested in this stuff and have almost definitely requested new features.) We can add things, but we can never take them away. When we decided to stop maintaining the archaic, seldom-used 3D Transform filter, we made it optional content (not disabled, just moved). The tech support boards lit up with all kinds of complaints. And at MacWorld, a guy browbeat me for–no kidding–25 minutes about the shortcut for Brightness/Contrast changing–in version 4! Can you imagine if we tried to remove something significant?

What to do? What about making Photoshop customizable–“everything you need, nothing you don’t,” to borrow from the Nissan ad? In CS2 you can now turn menu items on and off, assign them colors, and switch among sets rapidly. It’s a step towards reducing complexity, but will anyone care? Do you? Does this capability help new users, or does it hide tools they’d otherwise stumble across?

We can also package functionality in task-oriented sets. Camera Raw is popular as much for the way it pulls together color-correction functions as for its underlying math. Of course, with popularity come feature requests, and we have to be wary of building Russian dolls (Photoshop gets huge, so we build CR, which then gets huge, so we nest something inside of it…).
What do you think? Do we just keep putting one foot ahead of the other, or is something more radical required? I’d like to hear your thoughts.